Although there doesn't seem to be any progress in getting schools to change their policies, at least there are plenty of articles being written about the horror of zero-tolerance policies. In Palm Beach County last year, it was a felony charge of throwing a deadly missile for a 15-year-old carrying an egg in his pocket on Halloween, and trespassing charges against a 6-year-old for cutting across school property after hours. In Broward County, it was automatic expulsion for a student who found a knife in the seat of his school bus and tried to bring it to the driver's attention.

A recent report by a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights watchdog group goes even further, calling zero tolerance a miserable failure that has replaced the trip to the principal's office with even more frequent trips to jail, pushing a growing class of kids onto a one-way track toward juvenile hall. One of their major findings was that most of the indicents punished under ZT policies are not violence related.

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