Boy, 7, Who Took Gun to School Won’t Be Expelled : Education: L.A. board splits 4-3 against such action after plea by parents. The reprieve is a rare exception.

The Los Angeles Unified School District board made a rare exception to its zero-tolerance policy toward handguns Monday by voting against expelling a second-grader, the youngest student caught with a firearm since adoption of the 1993 policy.

The 7-year-old took an unloaded 9-millimeter handgun to Telfair Avenue Elementary in Pacoima in mid-January, where he showed it to classmates who reported it to school administrators. His father, testifying before the board on Monday, became choked with emotion as he described the boy as “very innocent” and blamed his wife for agreeing to store the gun for a relative.

“Never in my life did I think my son would find that gun,” said the boy’s mother, who also cried when she took her turn at the podium.

Although clearly softened by the tearful testimony and the boy’s young age, school board members--who split 4-3 on the expulsion vote--expressed misgivings about making an exception that might weaken their policy in the eyes of other students.

“As painful as it is, if we start to make exceptions . . . we go down a very slippery slope toward not sending a message of zero tolerance,” said board President Mark Slavkin, who favored expelling the boy. “It seems to me that it’s just a matter of luck that that particular 9-millimeter gun was not loaded.”

But others said the second-grader had already been punished enough--he was suspended for five days and transferred to another school, where he will now be allowed to remain. In addition, the board on Monday required that the boy and his parents receive counseling about firearms safety and other issues of parenting and responsibility.

“I believe we have an opportunity to have an impact on this whole family,” said board member Leticia Quezada, explaining her first-ever vote favoring leniency for a gun-toting student.

The decision drew criticism from the mother of Micheal Ensley, a 17-year-old whose February, 1993, shooting death at Reseda High School led the district to tighten its rules.

“I don’t think you can play with that rule. . . . I don’t think there is a gray area,” said Margaret Ensley. “We’ve got to have people on this board who are not afraid to make tough decisions.”

Shortly after the deaths of Ensley and Demetrius Rice at Fairfax High, Los Angeles Unified became one of the first school boards in the country to enforce automatic expulsion from the district for carrying guns. Random daily sweeps with hand-held metal detectors began at all high schools and middle schools, but not in elementary schools, where school police Chief Wesley Mitchell says they are not yet needed.

Since 1993, nearly 300 students have been expelled for at least a semester for possessing weapons at school. The policy allows exceptions, but only three others have been made for guns, and then only in cases where the firearm was a non-lethal BB or toy gun, said Hector Madrigal, the district’s director of student discipline proceedings.

Recently, state and federal laws and many school boards have embraced zero-tolerance policies. Debate rages, however, over how to deal with the youngest offenders, especially as districts watch serious violations including gun possession--reach increasingly down into the elementary grades.

“There is a general national consensus that a zero-tolerance policy is the only place for school systems to be,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation’s largest urban public school systems.

“But the whole zero-tolerance movement gets real fuzzy the younger the kids get because there’s no clear indication that the kid clearly understood what he or she was doing. I guess that means zero may not mean zero all the time.”

In Los Angeles Unified, alternatives to expulsion for older students include continuation school or independent study programs. For younger students, however, there is only one alternative school, in the Hyde Park area near Inglewood, which board members decided was too far to transfer the Pacoima boy.

The head of New York City Schools, Ramon C. Cortines, last week unveiled a proposal to enforce one-year mandatory suspensions from regular school for students found with guns or knives, no matter their age.

Yet even Cortines’ plan allows for exceptions and, instead of kicking students out of school entirely, calls for establishment of disciplinary academies for junior and senior high school students.

“Dumping a child, especially one who has shown a proclivity for carrying a gun, out onto the streets is not a reasonable solution,” said John Beckman, spokesman for the New York Board of Education.