Getting Too Tough?

Assuming a role usually assigned to parents or police, a growing number of the nation’s public schools are disciplining students for their misbehavior off campus.

A student driving drunk on a weekend or a teen caught fighting at the mall risks not only arrest and further consequences at home. Now, as the call for safe schools intensifies, they also may be suspended or expelled from the classroom.

Police stopped the car of a Newport Beach high school senior last February for playing the Grateful Dead too loud. It was a Tuesday, after the teenager’s school day ended, and he was running some errands for his mother. The officer found a trace of marijuana insufficient to issue Ryan Huntsman a citation, but school officials decided it was enough for a disciplinary transfer to another school 89 days before graduation.

Similar cases are cropping up across the nation. A middle-school boy near Syracuse, N.Y., made an obscene phone call to a classmate. A Connecticut teen was arrested for possessing two ounces of marijuana in the trunk of his car. A Virginia student spray-painted homes and churches.

In every instance, the schools moved to bar the student from campus for several months.

Zero-tolerance policies already in place at many schools generally prescribe suspension, transfer or expulsion when students are involved in the use or possession of drugs, alcohol or weapons on campus. Now, educators across the nation say they are expanding their authority off campus and after hours to keep delinquent behavior from creeping onto school grounds.

“We’re seeing an increase in zero tolerance for misbehavior both inside and outside school,” said Loren Siegel, director of public education for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Schools say it’s necessary.

“We have a new breed of violence standards,” said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village. “Parents, teachers and students are concerned about troublemakers. The public is concerned about school safety.”

Testing the Policies in Court

No figures are available on how common such cases have become. But the first ones already are reaching courtrooms, where they pose a new set of legal questions: Do public schools have any business getting involved in a student’s behavior away from campus? What about when that behavior directly affects the well-being of other students the schools are charged to protect?

“School districts believe that they can do whatever they feel like doing,” said Veronica Norris, a Tustin attorney who specializes in education law. She predicted that school boards will continue to expand the boundaries of their authority “until the courts make them stop doing it.”

The outcome of individual court challenges has been mixed so far, as the issue is debated in a spate of cases across the country. Some judges have ordered districts to allow students back to school; others have sided with school authorities.

In the Huntsman case, Newport-Mesa Unified School District officials said the high school senior violated that district’s zero-tolerance policy and transferred him from Corona del Mar High School to Newport Harbor High School because of his brush with police.

But in court, Huntsman’s lawyer, David Shores, argued that school administrators transferred the teen without a hearing, denying his due process rights. A Superior Court judge agreed, and Huntsman graduated from Corona del Mar High School last June. He now attends Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes.

The school district took the case to the Court of Appeal, which declared it moot because Huntsman had already graduated.

He also filed a $10-million civil rights lawsuit against the Newport Beach Police Department, the city and the school district, said his mother, Kathleen Huntsman. That suit is pending.

As a result of the Huntsman case, the school board revised its zero-tolerance policy to ensure that it holds a disciplinary hearing before students are punished, said board member James P. Ferryman.

But the school board stands by the decision to transfer Huntsman because “his next stop [after his brush with police] was to go into school,” Ferryman said. Huntsman disputes that. He said he was running some errands for his mother and was on his way back to her office when police stopped his car.

Ferryman said the district’s zero-tolerance policy is ambiguous, and the school board plans to reexamine it.

The concentrated crackdown on students originated in 1987 after Congress passed the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, educators said. The law funnels an average of $500 million a year to school districts to discourage drug use and violent behavior. As part of that movement, many districts adopted zero-tolerance policies to put teeth into their anti-drug efforts.

Before they began policing off-campus behavior, schools asserted their authority over students in other ways, including testing student athletes for drugs, allowing drug-sniffing dogs on campus and introducing school uniforms. From there, school officials began monitoring a student’s off-campus activities, the ACLU’s Siegel said.

In addition, Siegel said that many school officials will claim authority to discipline students because educators say parents are not doing the job at home.

“But does that mean that schools should swoop in and usurp a parent’s role?” Siegel asked. “Students have rights.”

School officials, however, say that policing the off-campus behavior of students is not new.

“It’s been in place for a long time for athletes and student leaders, said Dennis Meyers, assistant executive director of the Assn. of California School Administrators. “But in order to ensure safety on campus, it’s now extended to all the students.”

Kyle P. Packer, then a Thomaston, Conn., high school senior with good grades, an athlete’s poise and a penchant for partying, was headed home with his younger brother from a drive at dusk in September 1997 when Connecticut State Police troopers caught him with two ounces of marijuana in the trunk of his car.

It wasn’t the first time he had gotten into trouble.

The 19-year-old drank beer at an off-campus party when he was a freshman and was cut from a school team for the remainder of the season.

The school district wanted to suspend him for four months. But his parents hired lawyers, who obtained a court injunction and, after three weeks, Packer was back on campus. His criminal court case was dismissed.

“As a mother, I couldn’t rest,” Jane Packer said. “Who are these people who can selectively persecute and prosecute whoever they want?”

The Connecticut Supreme Court agreed, ruling that students could be expelled for their out-of-school behavior only if it “markedly interrupts or severely impedes the day-to-day operations of the school.” The Thomaston school board’s decision to suspend Packer did not meet that legal threshold, the court ruled.

Protecting Other Students

Although some cases involve victimless drug offenses such as Packer’s, others put school officials into legal quandaries. They can be sued for failing to protect students not only from violent behavior on campus, but also from various forms of harassment, from sexual to racial. But they can also be sued for moving to discipline students who are seen as harassers.

Ryan Kellogg, 13, was suspended for nine months from Liverpool Middle School outside Syracuse, N.Y., for making a single--but highly repugnant--telephone call to a female classmate in November 1997.

The message, recorded on a Saturday afternoon in November 1997, included a violent, sexually explicit threat. There was other sexual language, and some nonsexual statements.

The girl never heard Ryan’s message--her mother heard it instead--and Ryan was not arrested. Nonetheless, the school board banished him for the remainder of the school year.

Ryan was transferred to the district’s alternative school, but his mother, Ann Coghlan, balked. She sent the boy to his father’s house in Syracuse, where he could attend a regular middle school.

She admitted her son’s wrongdoing but blamed his actions on “adolescent behavior.” Coghlan cut off Ryan’s telephone privileges and banned him from socializing with another boy who was with him when the phone call was made.

She is suing the school district but so far has lost in court.

“What do they think they’re doing,” Coghlan asked, “going out into the community and telling parents how they should raise children when they’re not in school?”