Story Archive

Kicking ZT Up a Notch

Ethan Chaplin, a seventh-grader at Glen Meadow Middle School in Vernon, N.J., says he was having trouble with a bully. While sitting in math class, the bully saw his opportunity, considering the school’s zero-tolerance weapons policy: Chaplin was twirling his pencil. “He’s making gun motions!” the bully called out to the teacher. “Send him to juvie!” Sure enough, Chaplin was suspended from school. Well, no, says interim school Superintendent Charles Maranzano: that’s “partially not true,” he said. When a student “demonstrates odd behaviors, non-conforming behaviors, it causes us to take a closer look.” In Chaplin’s case, “We did exclude” him from class, but that was for what Chaplin’s father calls a five-hour physical and psychological evaluation. “The child was stripped, had to give blood samples and urine samples for of all things drug testing,” Michael Chaplin said. “Then four hours later a social worker spoke to him for five minutes and cleared him. Then an actual doctor came in and said the state was 100 percent incorrect in their procedure and this would not get him back in school.” However, once “cleared” by the “crisis center,” Chaplin was allowed back to class. “The issue remains that there was little grounds to actually take the actions they demanded,’ Michael Chaplin said. (RC/Newark Star-Ledger) ...Not submitting to bullies despite knowing the penalties the school will impose is now “odd, non-conforming behavior.” Got it.