I've been looking forward to the ACLU taking on this issue. I hate zero tolerance policies in schools. It eliminates logical thought and responsibility on the part of authority and it teaches a sad, distressing lesson to young people that the world is unfair and authority cannot be trusted to even listen to you, much less consider your side of an issue. Strict policies - I'm cool with, schools are no longer what they were when I was an inmatestudent. But ZT makes everyone powerless, end makes a mockery of trying to teach children right from wrong.

ZT is a kind of rule that nobody can claim rich, poor, white, black, young, or old on.

Everyone is treated the same. You don't want Johnny to have his principal say "Well, it was JUST an allergy pill" and Susie's principal says "Expulsion!" What's fair in that?

How is it 'right' to expect a child to properly use medication on their own? If 100 children bring their allergy medicine to school and have it on their own, what's to stop them from trading/sharing with someone who shouldn't have it? Or worse, what's to stop one kid from hoarding or gathering medicines from 20 kids and ODing?

Children shouldn't have unsupervised medicines. It's simple, if it ain't broke, don't break it further.

When I was that age my mom gave me my allergy pill before I went to school every morning. Sometimes I'd wait til lunch to eat it so I'd have a drink and so it'd be sure to last through baseball practice.

So what part of my little life story there deserves my being expelled?

Agreed. I carried baggies of OTC ibuprofen in my backpack after puberty, for personal use when the cramps came. They wouldn't give me *anything* at school, and my parents weren't always available to drop everything to bring one, so it was better for everyone that I have my own.

I could have been expelled, especially after other girls found out I had it and would come begging when they needed it. But I trusted the principal, who was a sort of mentor/friend; it was worth the risk.

The rule is not there for the 100 who behave properly, the rule is there for the 1 who doesn't.

I carried a buck knife. It was a 3-4 inch blade and I never had an issue with it cutting someone or myself because I knew how to handle it. I shouldn't have brought it to school, but I did. It was confiscated from me by the teacher who called my father who had to pick it up. No big deal. Had it gone to the Principal, I would have been in REAL trouble.

Do I really think that EVERYONE is as responsible? Do I think knives and medications should be in the hands of children? No. Because there is that 1.

Even if only 1 out of 10000 children die to overdoses of medications that they didn't understand, that's 1 too many. Especially when it's a young life which was easily saved with a ZT rule.

With that kind of thinking, we should all be locked up in our little partitioned cells, so no one gets harmed, ever.
(and even then, someone would find a way).

Why were they searching his locker and his backpack anyways?

I think that this kind of Zero Tolerance is ridiculous. We have the same thing at my school, I can get suspended for bringing aspirin, ibuprofen or any other medicine, even just one dose. Also, to take it at school you have to have a doctor's signature on one of their forms - parent permission does not pass.

When most medicines don't last longer than 6 hours, if that, it's just kind of a "sucks to be you" mentality cause you aren't allowed another dose once it wears off.

I agree with a sort of Zero Tolerance(confiscation and maybe lunch detention for personal doses, maybe in-school detention for handing it out), but I think it should be limited to elementary schools, where they don't understand, and with nothing more severe than detentions for middle and high schools.

When my school does drug searches, they bring in the dogs to sniff lockers. If the dog chooses one, the two lockers next to it are also searched. These are overall extremely ineffective because kids just keep the drugs in their backpacks, which they keep with them, but whatever.
Now, I have an quite a handful of food allergies, and so carry Benadryl on me at all times. I could probably have gotten a doctor's slip, but I didn't, because I'm lazy or whatever. My locker got indirectly tagged, and they found the box of my medicine. Still, without a slip or anything, I got absolutely no punishment. The cop just said, "Oh, okay." and let me go. All this happened just last year.
Just goes to show that ZT really doesn't mean zero tolerance.

Off topic, but that pretty much describes my life story.

Couldn't they just go to the school nurse...oh wait that isn't in the budget anymore...yup just have to suffer.

Oh no, they have nurses... but they can't give you anything more than an ice pack and a place to lay until your parents come to get you, unless you are clearly dying or something.

Not even OTCs. They're too afraid of lawsuits.

I don't think you can compare a weapon to an over-the-counter anti-allergy drug. Most places don't implement ZT to ensure everyone gets equal treatment, they implement it as a cover your a** method.

Think about it for a second. Let's apply ZT to killing someone. You kill someone means you get the death penalty. ZT means that if you accidentally run someone over with your car and they die, you get the death penalty. If you kill someone in self defense, you get the death penalty. You accidentally leave your child in the car and i..., you get the death penalty. And so on.

There is a reason why the law wasn't written that way: lawmakers realized that you have to look at the circumstances of what happened in order to decide whether or not you should be punished and what punishment is fitting.

You might also want to read Randy Cassingham's essay on ZT

The lawsuit will be settled without going to trial. The school is clearly in the wrong, not for merely having a ZT policy, but for screwing up its administration.

The ZT policy is for objects and substances that are illegal and/or harmful. Since the single pill in question is not an age-protected product in that jurisdiction (therefore not illegal), and a single dose of an OTC medication cannot legally be considered to be harm-producing, they messed up pretty badly and will have to bend over.