I was going to post this here, but I thought Zero Intelligence would be a better place for it.School Board to Weigh Perry's Fate
Superintendent's Position Uncertain After DWI Charge
By S. Mitra Kalita
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 29, 2004; 3:58 PM
The Alexandria School Board votes tonight on whether Superintendent Rebecca L. Perry, arrested last week on charges of drunken driving, should keep her job.
Over the last week, the board held about 10 hours of closed-door fact-finding meetings into Perry's arrest. Board members and school officials say their meetings have been closed because Perry's tenure is a personnel matter. Perry was placed on a week's paid leave after her arrest.
To top it all off, WaPo's Metro Columnist Marc Fisher hits it out of the park.
I agree with members of the Alexandria School Board who admire Perry for her forthright admission of wrongdoing. Forgiveness is indeed a beautiful lesson to teach.
But: I also know that if a student at the schools Perry oversees were caught disobeying the system's rules about drinking alcohol, there would be no statements from the School Board chairman about a "healing process." No tearful confession would slow or halt the machinery of punishment.
No, there would be harsh and quick action, backed up with stern reminders about the rules, about zero tolerance, about suspensions and expulsions.
Zero tolerance undermines trust and teaches entirely the wrong lessons: That intent doesn't matter, that people in authority must not be allowed to exercise judgment.
...What should Alexandria's School Board do with Superintendent Perry? In the real world, people of good judgment should be able to consider a miscreant's past and her performance and decide what's best for her and for the institution. (Actually, in the real world, we are bizarrely torn between redemption, which we routinely offer to celebrities, sports figures and even politicians, and retribution, which we increasingly exact from plagiarists, editors and corporate executives.)
Ideally, School Board members would look at Perry -- in a public meeting, not in the secret sessions it has held so far -- and decide whether her talents more than make up for this mistake, in which case they would keep her. Then, having thought this through, they would start rolling back the trend toward unthinking, undiscerning approaches to student discipline.
But in a system that does not trust itself to make judgments about individuals, in schools that cede their moral authority to lawyers and codes and simplistic bromides such as zero tolerance, the verdict on Perry must be the same as it would be for the children whose suspensions she manages when she's sober:
Show her the door.
Well, maybe the people of Alexandria should let Ms. Perry have her job back, after a stern lecture, of course. Then, perhaps we'll have at least one public school administrator who will dissent from the Zero-Tolerance orthodoxy, having been on its receiving end before.
Posted by Thief at April 29, 2004 04:49 PM