The failure of zero tolerance

Wed, 29 Aug 2001 19:27:00 +0000

As children return to school this month, they can expect to face some uninspired teachers, an occasional moment of lunchroom humiliation and onerous piles of homework. That they knew. What they also face, and may be unaware of, is suspension, banishment and encounters with the police, under new zero tolerance disciplinary policies with extraordinarlily broad definitions of offensive or dangerous behavior.

For example, students older than 13 who attend public school in Mississippi are now subject to the educational equivalent of a "three strikes" law. Passed by the Legislature last spring, this bill allows for the expulsion of a student deemed to have been "disruptive" in class three times over the course of a year. A state NAACP executive board member was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that her 17-year-old son, who had a cold, was kicked out of class after taking a tissue off his teacher's desk without permission. Under the new statute, that act could constitute strike one. "If this rule were in effect this year, he wouldn't be graduating," she said. "He'd be on strike seven."

Old and in the family way

Wed, 23 May 2001 19:06:00 +0000

Pregnant at 51, photographer Annie Leibovitz is the latest, and perhaps the oldest, entrant in the burgeoning celebrity class of Mothers of a Certain Age. She follows Cheryl Tiegs, also 51, who recently delivered twins; and playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who had her daughter, Lucy Jane, at 48.

And then there are the rest of us, a newly abundant group of professional and well-educated "aged" individuals with access to current reproductive technology. The latest figures from Massachusetts -- a state that mandates insurance coverage of fertility treatments -- provide convincing evidence: More women there are giving birth between the ages of 35 and 40 than between 20 and 25. What's more, the largest increases are taking place among those in the 40- to 45-year-old age bracket. Deborah Klein Walker, the Massachusetts associate commissioner of public health, calls the development "a trend."

Salon.com > Johanna Wald

The failure of zero tolerance

Old and in the family way