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Call the parents before police

The latest example of how common sense isn't so common: Two third-grade boys in Ocala were charged with felonies for drawing stick figures depicting violence toward a classmate.

The boys, ages 9 and 10, drew crude cartoons of another student being stabbed and hanged. The object of the cartoons told the teacher, who told the school dean, who called police. After consultation with the state attorney's office, police arrested the boys - who were special education students - and charged them with making a written threat to kill or harm another person.

Ocala police have defended their decision by saying they saw three signs of possible trouble: the boys had acted to intimidate their victim all year; one of the arrested boys had previously stabbed a different student with a pencil and the drawings reminded some of the early warning signs seen before the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado.

But another motivation for the arrest emerged during a conversation Monday with Ocala Police Sgt. Russ Kern. "(If an attack occurred), no one wanted to be the one left saying, "We saw this and we did nothing,' " said Kern, a public information officer who has received hundreds of e-mails and calls from news outlets in London and Moscow over the story. "After Columbine, you can't take any chances."

This cover-yourself decisionmaking among educators has resulted in highly punitive actions that rarely seem focused on helping children in crisis. For example, Kern acknowledged police decided to arrest the boys without consulting their parents, excluding an important source of information and a crucial resource for solving the problem.

It is easy to routinely resort to extreme measures in the wake of a tragedy such as the Columbine killings. But calling police to mediate a dispute in which no violence has yet occurred seems more like passing the buck than effective education.

Such decisions also highlight the difference between teaching and punishment: One strategy deals with a crisis by helping students address their own problems; the other strategy delays a real solution through penalties and procedure.

In the Ocala case, charging such young children with a felony for their drawing aggravates a problem rather than solves one. The choice was not between doing nothing and calling in the police. There are instances when police are needed to handle violent students and charge them with crimes, but the available evidence indicates this is not one of them.

[Last modified February 2, 2005, 00:45:58]