First the obvious, a small knife should be in every glove compartment in the world. The girl should be let go because it was not a weapon. You should be expected to carry incendiaries (auto flares), chains, tire irons, and maybe even a hatchet in your car.
That said, you do need special rules for public schools. A public school is essentially a type of prison. You are forced to go there and labor for no pay. You have no control over your cell mates, many of whom have problems with an over abundance of recently aquired testosterone. The diversity of the students in city schools adds oportunities for frictions and misunderstandings. The students are crammed together in greater numbers and in higher proximity than normal society. The students are captives under pressure to conform and perform.
The school characteristic that particularly needs to be considered is proximity. The students are so close together that there is often no time to intervene when something goes wrong. Even a knife can do a lot of harm in the context of a crowded hallway while a gun in the car can imperil an unusually large number of unarmed people at a school.
It might seem like all you need to do is keep an eye on trouble-making students. That is more like what we did in years past. If a kid who's an amateur gunsmith brings an antique to school he is probably not a hazard, while a thug with a carpet knife is a serious threat. The trouble is that it is considered discriminatory to only search "bad" students. (That's exactly what is intended, to use our powers of discretion to select who to search). We have legal problems searching people without probable cause. This is true regardless of race or ethnicity. When you throw race, ethnicity, and gender into the mix, you run the risk of violating anti-discrimination laws. Why should only guys with low-hanging pants and tatoos get searched?
So we get this stupid practise of random searches that have to involve harmless young women. Within the halls of schools you need to draw some precise, enforceable, standards that let you take the carpet knife away from the thug. There is a real question whether you can allow SAK's and ban razor utility knives. School administrators often set the rules as broad as possible to proscribe the odd thing a student may use as a weapon. Back in my youth a broken car antenna or a bicycle chain were considered obvious weapons, while a Scout knife wasn't.
The way to add intelligence into the situation is to volunteer for participation in school advisory bodies. Go help your local principals. Join the district accountability committees, etc. Try and find simple defenseable standards that reasonably protect the children that we have put in this vulnerable environment we call school. Once you get there, you'll find so many challenges that you will likely shrug off a few incidental searches and suspensions. You wouldn't believe the types of real threats that occur, even in good high schools. By holding to a tough line on the "letter of the regulations" the administrators are trying to have the tools they need to insure they will be able to isolate the serious threats when they occur.
The suspended student and her mother may actually be right. It is a small matter for them to suffer from a bogus suspension, if it gives the school the tools it needs to protect student safety. The students need the extra protection. If they even so much as ditch school to avoid danger they will have to defend themselves from charges of truancy.
[This message has been edited by Jeff Clark (edited 23 November 1999).]
