Lindsay Brown, an 18-year-old Fort Myers, Fla. honors student was arrested, then suspended when a school official found a kitchen knife with a 5-inch blade on the floor of her car which was parked on campus. She says she was moving and it must have dropped out. She has no previous disciplinary problems (as far as I know) and was not even aware that she had a knife in her car. She is not being allowed to participate in the school's graduation tonight and her state-sponsored scholarship to Florida Gulf Coast University may be revoked. Should schools react to all the shootings in such a manner?

-- Anonymous, May 29, 2001

Answers

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I think this is going to far.

I also remember hearing something lately (I thought it was from my niece, but maybe it was on a forum somewhere) about kids not being able to bring compasses (the metal ones that you use to make a circle) to school anymore because they could be used as a weapon too.

I really wish I could remember where I heard that.

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2001

I find it a little dubious that a moderately large kitchen knife just kind of fell out of a box in someone's car while they were moving and they left it there for a few days or didn't notice it at all. With all the school violence in the news, what is the administration supposed to think when they see this? I do think the punishment may have been excessive -- it was in the car, after all, not on her person or anything. But I don't think this is such a glaring example of a stupid no-tolerance policy as expelling kids for sharing tylenol or having an asthma inhaler or possessing a sharpened pencil.

-- Anonymous, June 04, 2001

I don't blame the officials for being suspicious. I do blame them, severely, for creating a stupid one-size-fits-all policy so that a good student with no track record of being a problem and no indication at all that she meant any harm, gets the same punishment that a longtime delinquent would.

Punishment should fit the action ... I don't say "crime" because the way the school has it set up, she committed the "crime" and violated the policy. But there's something seriously wrong when someone who is by all accounts a good kid and up to no harm can have her academic future jeopardized for what is by all the evidence a simple oversight.

And yes, I DO believe that her story is at least possibly true. Kitchen knives aren't used daily in every household, so it's not implausible that it wasn't missed right away. It's even possible that it WAS missed, and just no one knew where it was.

If it was in plain sight, it's not like she was making some effort to conceal it, so that would argue against her having any plans to commit murder with it.

The whole thing is just dumb.

-- Anonymous, June 04, 2001