Zero Tolerance Lets a Student’s Future Hang on a Knife’s Edge

No big deal. That’s what 16-year-old Taylor Hess thought, watching the assistant principal walk into his fourth-period class.

For Taylor, life was good, couldn’t be better. He was an honors student. He was a star on the varsity swim team. That morning, he’d risen at 5:30 for practice. It was agonizing, diving into the school pool before sunrise, but Taylor liked getting something done early. He also liked the individuality of his sport, how in swimming you can only blame yourself.

The assistant principal, he now realized, was looking at him. In fact, Nathaniel Hearne was pointing at him. “Get your car keys,” Hearne said. “Come with me.”

Taylor still thought, no big deal. Maybe he’d left his headlights on. Maybe he’d parked where he shouldn’t.

“A knife has been spotted in your pickup,” Hearne said.

He’d gone camping with friends on Saturday, Taylor told him. Maybe someone left a machete in the truck.

“OK,” Hearne said. “We’ll find out.”

In the parking lot, beside the 1993 cranberry red Ford Ranger he’d worked all summer to buy, Taylor saw Alan Goss, the Hurst city policeman assigned full time to L.D. Bell High. He also saw two private security officers holding a pair of dogs trained to find drugs and weapons.

Taylor looked at the bed of his pickup. It wasn’t a machete after all, but an unserrated bread knife with a round point. A long bread knife, a good 10 inches long, lying right out in the open.

Now it clicked. That’s my grandma’s kitchen knife, Taylor explained. She had a stroke, we had to move her to assisted living, put her stuff in our garage. Last night we took it all to Goodwill. This must have fallen out of a box. I’ll lock it up in the cab. Or you can keep it. Or you can call my parents to come get it.

The others just kept staring at the knife. Taylor thought they looked confused, like they didn’t know what to do.

“Is it sharp?” Hearne finally asked.

Officer Goss ran his finger along the blade. “It’s fairly sharp in a couple of spots.”

Hearne slipped the knife inside his sport coat. Taylor walked with him back to class, wondering what his punishment might be. Saturday detention hall, maybe. He’d never pulled D hall before, never been in any trouble.

“Get your stuff and come to my office,” Hearne said. “I’ve got to warn you, Taylor, this is a pretty serious thing.”

*

Beginnings at Columbine

The Hurst-Euless-Bedford Independent School District, about 12 miles west of Dallas, resembles so many others that have fashioned zero-tolerance polices to combat mounting fears of campus violence. For most districts, it began in 1994 with the federal Gun-Free Schools Act, which required all schools receiving federal aid to expel students who bring firearms to campus. Many states and school boards, appalled by the shootings that culminated in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, adopted policies even wider and tougher than the federal law. Everything from paper guns to nail files became weapons, everything from second-grade kisses to Tylenol tablets cause for expulsion. In countless rule books, “shall” and “must” replaced administrative discretion.

There’d been crazy situations ever since: Eighth-graders arrested for bringing “purple cocaine”--grape Kool-Aid--in lunch boxes; a sixth-grader suspended for bringing a toy ax as part of his Halloween fireman costume; a boy expelled for having a “hit list” that turned out to be his birthday party guests. Pundits clucked and civil rights lawyers protested, but for the most part, parents liked the changes, in fact campaigned for them. They wanted more rules, stricter rules. They also wanted consistency. They wanted students treated equally.

Jim Short, the principal of L.D. Bell High, understood all this as he sat at his desk on Monday afternoon, Feb. 25. Just minutes before, they’d found Taylor Hess’ knife. Short’s heart told him to ignore the matter. He knew Taylor well, thought him a great kid, a terrific young man. He believed the boy’s story, he understood what had happened. He didn’t believe Taylor had done anything wrong. Yet as principal, Short didn’t think he could turn a blind eye.

Before him he had the Texas Education Code’s Chapter 37 and his own school district’s student code of conduct. They both told him the same thing: He had no latitude. There it was in the state code: A student shall be expelled ... if the student on school property ... possesses an illegal knife. There it was in the district code: Student will be expelled for a full calendar year....

Nothing got people’s attention more quickly than weapons on campus. Short appreciated this. He was 50 years old. For 26 years, he’d worked in the Abilene, Texas, schools, the last 15 as a principal, before coming to L.D. Bell this year. He knew schools could be dangerous places. An Abilene teacher had been shot on campus. Kids were good generally, but some just didn’t care. If Short ignored an infraction, it could blow up in his face. If he ignored Taylor Hess’ knife, people would hear about it. Then he’d be assailed for paying no heed to a big carving knife. He had to follow the rules.

Still--Short had a sick feeling. He kept asking himself, what did he expect Taylor to have done differently?

At 2 p.m. that day, Short met with five assistant principals and the Hurst police officer, Alan Goss. They traded opinions without reaching a consensus. Most, even while hoping Taylor might win a later appeal, thought the state and district codes mandated expulsion.

We don’t make the laws, the way Officer Goss saw it. Their hands were tied. If he were working as a street cop, if he had pulled Taylor over and seen an illegal knife in his pickup, Goss had discretion on whether even to write a report. He’d probably let him go with a warning. But he couldn’t do that on school grounds. Not under the district’s zero-tolerance policy.

Short found himself sounding the most liberal. Yet he saw his colleagues’ viewpoints. It seemed to him they were honorable people with different opinions. Honorable people who all left the meeting with long faces.

More voices soon chimed in. The Texas Education Agency advised that the district had to proceed against Taylor. A county prosecuting attorney said yes, this was a case he’d accept, this was a violation of the penal code.

That made a difference. Officer Goss had been expecting the prosecuting attorney to say no, don’t bring it to me. Expecting--and hoping.

At 2:40 p.m., Taylor Hess, summoned from his 11th-grade advanced-placement chemistry class, stepped into the principal’s office. This will all blow over, he’d been telling himself. If no one else knows, they can let it pass. He didn’t feel guilty or anxious, the way you did when you knew you’d messed up. Besides, he had a history with this principal. Jim Short had been supportive of the swim team. He’d sat around with them, talking to Taylor, congratulating him for being regional backstroke champ. Short knew him, knew what kind of kid he was.

A non-event. That’s what all this was, Taylor figured. A non-event.

He explained again, telling Short about his grandma’s stroke, packing up her stuff, driving to Goodwill. Short appeared to believe him but still looked mighty serious. When Taylor stopped talking, Short said, “Taylor, are you aware this calls for mandatory expulsion?”

*

Parents’ Disbelief

Robert and Gay Hess, Taylor’s parents, have an unspoken rule. She doesn’t call him at work unless it’s urgent. She’s a physical therapist’s assistant at North Hills Hospital; he’s a customer service manager for American Eagle airline at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. At 3 p.m. that Monday, his pager beeped while he sat in a staff meeting. He bolted from the room to call his wife.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she began, sounding distraught. Taylor’s principal had just phoned her. She’d realized right off what this was about. She’d explained everything to Jim Short. He’d appreciated her account, Gay thought. After all, she’d corroborated Taylor’s story without knowing what Taylor had told them. Yet Gay didn’t think she’d swayed the principal. This is very serious, he’d kept telling her. This is very serious.

Robert Hess tried to calm his wife. He was good at solving problems and easing tension. That’s what he did all day with aggravated airline travelers. He could fix this. It was a bread knife, after all. Taylor obviously never even saw it. They were all grown-ups, weren’t they?

“The school district has competent leaders,” Robert told Gay. “Surely they will be fair and logical.”

Late that day, he called Jim Short’s office and arranged to meet with him the next afternoon. During dinner, the Hess family--Taylor has one older brother, Jordan, 17, then an L.D. Bell senior--talked things over. Gay thought it ironic that their family had always wanted to make schools safer; she’d never expected it would backfire on them. Taylor thought, this just shows that no good deed goes unpunished.

Robert Hess’ mind drifted to Sunday, to their hours in the garage packing up his mother Rose’s stuff. Going through everything had sparked such memories. The glassware, for instance. He was 46 now, yet there were glasses he remembered drinking from as a child, glasses his mom had used to serve Kool-Aid at Cub Scout meetings. She must have kept them, he imagined, because they took her back to a time when she was a young, beautiful woman with small children. Now 80, she sat in assisted living, unaware of Taylor’s plight, for they’d chosen not to upset her.

It was funny. Robert and Gay had debated about the cutlery set. Gay had decided not to keep it, so it went into a box. Dusk fell before they finished. In the dark, Robert and Taylor drove a mile to the Goodwill center, bouncing along on the Ranger’s old springs. The night drop-off area was poorly lighted, so they could barely see as they unloaded. They worked fast, eager to get home.

Don’t worry, Robert Hess told his family now. Maybe Taylor will have to write an essay. Something like that. Something that fits the event.

*

A Word Study

Again and again, Principal Jim Short flipped through the penal code, the state code, the school code. He asked himself, how do you define “possession”? He studied the words: “knowingly” ... “willingly” ... “recklessly.” The first two didn’t apply, but “recklessly”--there were those in the district, both below and above him, who thought Taylor’s conduct reckless.

Another word drew Short’s attention: “shall.” Shall be expelled, not “may” be expelled.

The school principal drove home that Monday night feeling distraught. He had a teenage son himself, one who enjoyed dove hunting. His boy could leave a knife or gun in his car. Surely, this could be his own child in trouble. Short tried to find a way to feel OK in his heart about what he had to do. He couldn’t. Part of him wondered why Taylor hadn’t just denied any knowledge of the knife, of ever seeing it before. Part of him wished Taylor had done just that.

In years past, being an educator had been simpler. Short had grown up in a small southeast New Mexico town. He dad sold farm equipment, his mom taught piano. He married early, while still an aimless college sophomore. What drew him to working in schools were his own teachers, tremendous teachers. Now he’d be proud if his own children went into teaching. His daughter was an opera singer, earning a master’s; his son played baseball in junior college. Short remained optimistic about kids. He loved showing off L.D. Bell High. The choir particularly made him beam. This is why I love what I do, he’d declare, his arms waving as the students sang.

Ten years ago, he would have handled the Taylor Hess situation by himself. No longer. Now Short had to talk to his district supervisors, who talked to the district superintendent, Gene Buinger. People in Buinger’s office had to talk to the Texas Education Agency and local police authorities. The rules and codes kept evolving. Although the federal Gun-Free Schools Act had allowed them “case by case” flexibility, the state refined and the districts refined even further. It was Texas that required expulsion of a student with an “illegal knife,” but it was Short’s own district that insisted the expulsion be for a full year.

Some school administrators found it insulting or preposterous to lose personal discretion. Zero-tolerance panels at school board conferences often drew overflow crowds. There was always talk of the foolish cases. In recent years in Short’s district, there’d been half a dozen as perplexing as Taylor Hess’, half a dozen where district Supt. Buinger believed the punishment had been excessive. “Feel-good legislation” is what Buinger called the state laws; legislation that is “supposed to solve, but deep down, everyone knows it just addresses issues superficially.”

Still, Buinger had to admit--zero-tolerance rules made life easier. They eased the burden. By applying consistency instead of subjective judgment, you had support for your actions rather than claims of discrimination. If Jim Short disregarded the Taylor Hess case and six months later a different principal responded another way with, say, a Latino student, you would surely hear cries about prejudice.

That, above all, was why Short’s supervisors wanted firm formulas. Their school district was in transition, undergoing “a change in demographics.” It was one-third minority now, mostly Latino. There was a distinct and growing gap between poorer and more affluent students. For people to have faith in the school system, they had to believe everyone was being treated equally.

Deep down, despite his unease, Jim Short agreed. He had to admit: He derived a certain comfort in not having discretion. He could lean on that. He could then say he followed the formula.

As arranged, Robert Hess appeared in his office at 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday. Assistant Principal Nathaniel Hearne joined them. So did the Hurst police officer, Alan Goss. Hess sat down, ready to settle this as he did most problems. Right off, though, Short handed him a letter and asked him to sign a receipt for it.

For the first time, Hess began to feel a little nervous. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me read it.”

This letter is to notify you that your son, Ryan Taylor Hess, is being considered for expulsion from L.D. Bell High School.... We have scheduled a Due Process Hearing for Friday, March 1 at 9:00 a.m....

Hess’ nervousness grew. This looked more significant than he’d expected. He asked, “Would I be overreacting if I brought an attorney?”

“I can’t say,” Short told him. “But if you do, you need to notify us so we have ours too.”

The principal felt he owed it to Hess to be truthful. Short himself would preside at the due process hearing, he explained. He’d be following the code of conduct. It would be unlikely that he’d be able to recommend anything but expulsion.

Hess, normally easy with conversation, sat speechless. OK, he thought, OK. This has gone a step or two further than he’d expected. But surely they’d resolve this at the hearing. They just needed to prepare; they just needed to get ready.

They needed to do one other thing, Robert Hess decided. They needed to call a lawyer.

*

Quizzing the Educators

A door at the rear of the principal’s office leads into a private conference room. There everyone gathered at 9 a.m. Friday, settling around a rectangular table. On the table, a tape recorder turned silently. Facing the Hess family now, along with Short, Hearne and Goss, was Dianne Byrnes, who directs the district’s “alternative education programs” for problem kids.

This wouldn’t be adversarial, Short had advised. Yet it seemed that way to the Hesses. Taylor felt numb, in shock, ready for anything. He talked little, trying instead to grasp what was going on. Same with his mother, who couldn’t believe this was even happening. Mainly, Robert Hess spoke for the family.

He’d been preparing for two days, studying the codes, scouring the Internet, consulting an attorney, drafting specific questions for each person present. Whoever loses his temper, he reminded himself, is at a disadvantage. So he spoke politely, without a hint of antagonism, something that Short noted and appreciated. Yet as they walked through the facts of the case, Hess poured on the questions, unrelenting.

You don’t have the knife or a photo of the knife at this hearing? You don’t have a copy of the police report? You’re sitting here today without any of the evidence? Do you really think these proceedings are fair? Do you really feel you’re following the spirit of the law? Do any of you in the least doubt the truth of Taylor’s explanation? What are your feelings about the school district’s zero-tolerance policies? How do you feel about what you’re doing to Taylor?

Dianne Byrnes, who wrote the district’s code of conduct and spends most of her time on matters of discipline, took the hardest line. Her stance made the Hess family feel uncomfortable. “Taylor did have a knife visible in his truck ... ,” she said. “Taylor did put students at risk.... The spirit of the law is to ensure the safety of students.... I think there was a risk factor.”

Jim Short sounded much more ambivalent. Where Byrnes resisted questions about personal feelings, he responded. He thought zero-tolerance policies “a two-edged sword.” They made it possible for him to “look myself in the mirror and know that I treated the students as equally as I possibly could.” On the other hand, the policies “make you feel like you lose some judgment.” So it was for him “a love-hate thing.”

Short turned to Hess. “I don’t know if that answers your question.”

Hess said, “Yes, you answered it eloquently. I can appreciate how frustrating it must be to have your hands tied.”

Short sighed. “I’d be lying if I said any aspect of this is pleasant. This is a sorrowful experience.”

As they talked, Hess kept looking for signs. No one else had files or questions or evidence. They’ve already made their decision, he concluded. Reading their body language, he believed he saw people eager to go. To him, Dianne Byrnes seemed particularly antsy, glancing often at her watch. She had another appointment, she declared finally. They would have to postpone this hearing.

“No,” Robert Hess said. “We’re not through.”

Short eventually sided with Hess. At 11 a.m., two hours into the hearing, Dianne Byrnes left. Hess seized the opportunity. Again he asked Short how he felt.

“Miserable,” the principal said, with a rueful laugh. “How’s that?” He paused. “There’s not a good feeling in my body about this.”

Half an hour later, they all rose. Short usually ruled right away in these situations, but not today. “I want to think about this over the weekend,” he told the Hess family.

*

Doing the ‘Right Thing’

Late on Monday afternoon, Robert Hess called the L.D. Bell office. “I need another day,” Jim Short told him. “I want to make sure we do the right thing for Taylor and for the student population of Bell High.”

Hess’ heart sank. Right thing for the student population. Oh my God, he thought. They’re going to expel Taylor.

That night he warned his family. Taylor reeled. He’d been in turmoil for a week. Like his principal, he’d been wondering why he hadn’t just denied any knowledge of the knife. It hadn’t occurred to him, though. There’d been no reason to lie. Besides, he’d always been taught to tell the truth.

Taylor had career plans. He wanted to get a private pilot’s license; he wanted to study aeronautical engineering. Now what would happen? Taylor couldn’t help but think this whole thing made the school administrators look cowardly. Nobody was asking, what should we do? Instead, everyone was asking, what do we have to do?

The call from Short finally came at 3:15 p.m. Tuesday. “I’ve decided to expel Taylor,” the principal told Robert Hess. “You can appeal. I encourage you to appeal. If you do, I’ll be one of Taylor’s biggest advocates.” Short also asked, “Do you want me to tell Taylor, or should you?”

“We’ll both tell him,” Hess said. “I’m on my way there.”

Driving to the school, he called his wife of 28 years. She’d been more optimistic than him. “Baby,” he said. “They’re expelling Taylor.”

First came a long silence. Then Gay began crying.

He wanted to soothe her, but felt powerless. He also wanted to cry with her, but knew if he gave up, there’d be nobody left to defend their son.

“Why are they doing this to our baby?” Gay asked.

In Short’s office, Hess and the principal swapped letters.

Legalese filled Short’s: “This is to inform you of my decision to recommend expulsion of Ryan Taylor Hess from L.D. Bell High School.”

Hess’ cited a federal appellate court ruling in another zero-tolerance case: A school administrator that executed such an action could be held personally liable and would not have the luxury of his qualified immunity.

Hess vainly implored Short to reconsider. Hess said, “Mr. Short, the only thing that can happen from this point on is, this could get bigger and uglier.”

Short replied, “I’ll try not to take that as a threat.” Yet to himself, he thought: This man is just being an advocate for his child. I would do exactly the same.

They called Taylor in. He’d been waiting in the anteroom, summoned once again from his advanced-placement chemistry class. Short explained his decision. Taylor felt gut-punched, stung with pain. All my hard work shot to hell, he thought. Honors classes, the swim team, all a waste of time. He held his tongue, though. Jim Short thought him amazingly courteous.

The principal let Taylor stay at L.D. Bell for two more days, Wednesday and Thursday. Taylor told all his friends now, after keeping things mostly to himself. A couple of teachers had him get up, explain to the class. He asked his English teacher to spread the word wider, to tell other students. Taylor preferred that everyone hear the true story rather than think he’d gone and stabbed someone.

*

Alternative School

That Friday, Robert Hess drove Taylor to Crossroads, the district’s “short-term alternative” educational program “designed for students who lack the motivation to conduct themselves in accordance with the district’s student code of conduct.” It felt to the father as if he were delivering his son to prison.

Officers at the front door searched Taylor’s bags, patted him down, scrutinized him for all manner of infractions. Rules about clothing, grooming, jewelry, hairstyles and accessories filled a long page. So did academic regulations. Pending his appeal, Taylor was to sit in the same classroom all day, working on assignments sent over by his teachers at L.D. Bell.

Off he went, down an eerily silent hallway absent of spirited chatter. The minutes crawled by. Taylor found the day unbearably boring, a waste of time. Most of his classmates were remedial students, working on how to calculate the area of a triangle. He was dealing with electron-negativity differentials, Lewis-dot structures, how to figure the polarity of compounds. When he asked the teacher for advice, she allowed that she didn’t know much chemistry. She called other teachers. No one could help. Yet the school’s rule was, you can’t leave the campus until you complete your day’s assignments. So Taylor wrote down random curves and figures just to finish, knowing it meant he’d draw a zero.

Four school days passed, interrupted by a weeklong spring break. The Hesses finally told Grandma Rose about Taylor’s expulsion. She offered to go talk to the principal, to tell him he’d made a terrible mistake. She cried when they told her this was one thing she couldn’t fix.

Taylor yearned for his classes at L.D. Bell. In his honors English, they’d been reading Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” harder even than Shakespeare, but he didn’t mind because his English teacher was so brilliant. Taylor started trying to come up with things to do. One day, he felt so delirious, he wrote his girlfriend a three-page note in the form of a haiku, complete with illustrations.

At least it took a long time. At least it occupied his mind.

*

Debate Goes Public

On the Thursday afternoon of spring break, district Supt. Gene Buinger arrived home to find a note on his front door. It was from Monica Mendoza, a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Robert Hess had contacted her, she advised, and had provided her a tape recording of Taylor’s due process hearing. She’d be writing a story for the Sunday paper. Did Buinger want to respond?

Buinger had heard about the Taylor Hess case. There were 20,000 students in his district, though, 30 schools in all, so he didn’t have a complete grasp of the matter. His first response to the reporter’s note was surprise--surprise that the Hess family had gone to a newspaper. In his 20 years as a superintendent, that had never happened. Most parents didn’t want the notoriety. The Hesses were waiving lots of confidentiality rights.

That didn’t mean Buinger believed he could waive confidentiality. He declined to comment to the reporter, explaining that federal law prevented him from responding. Then he braced himself for the article.

Jim Short’s phone rang at 4:30 that Sunday morning. You going to call off school? an anonymous voice inquired. Short didn’t know what the man was talking about. He was still in bed and hadn’t seen the newspaper. The caller explained: They’re going to have lots of sharp pencils out.

By 10 that morning, the onslaught had begun, mostly directed at Short. Phone calls, e-mails, radio talk shows, TV cameras, CNN, NBC--from all quarters, pundits and outraged citizens were lambasting him. He’d never imagined being the subject of radio talk shows; he’d never grasped the full might of the Internet.

Zero tolerance is a cop-out. Here my tax dollars are paying a principal to not use his judgment ... Ludicrous ... I am so disgusted

Other messages scared Short even more. The loudest voices came not from civil libertarians but from the antigovernment, right-to-bear-arms crowd. Free men are armed, slaves are disarmed. The Constitution guarantees the right of the people to bear arms ... You’re just a bunch of left-wing nazi indoctrinators ... Take away the arms and you break a nation.

Most damaging of all were the Hess family’s comments. They were doing back-to-back interviews now, filling TV screens by the hour. It had been their attorney’s idea to contact the news media. They agreed, seeing no other alternative, but called only the one Fort Worth reporter. They’d not expected the enormous response. They’d not realized that people would sense this could happen to their own kids, to anyone. The feedback felt good to the Hess family, but also scary. “We’re just regular working folks,” Robert Hess kept saying. “We’re not used to TV trucks and reporters outside our door. This feels so alien.”

All the same, they handled it with aplomb. Hess observed that “an act of being a good Samaritan now has this fine young man expelled from school.... Having zero tolerance doesn’t mean having zero judgment or zero rights.” Taylor, amid bashful shrugs, said, “Somehow a knife had to fall out. A fork couldn’t fall out, a spoon couldn’t fall out.... It’s criminal trespass if I go on campus, which means I can’t see my brother graduate.”

Gene Buinger and Jim Short realized there was no way to look good. Truth was, they didn’t feel good. Buinger thought of his old Marine adage: There’s a time when you have to stand at attention and take it.

By Tuesday, though, he’d decided to respond. The school district called a news conference for 2 p.m., timed to make the evening news. Buinger still wouldn’t discuss the details of the Hess case, but he wanted to explain the state laws and district codes that mandated their zero-tolerance policy. With printed handouts and a big-screen PowerPoint presentation, he emphasized the “musts” and “shalls.”

“We’re very limited in what we can do,” he said. “I understand the public’s frustration. I’m frustrated too.... Individuals opposed to such policies should take their concerns to their respective state legislators.”

Watching from the back of the hall, Robert Hess thought Buinger handled himself well. The superintendent had said something about possibly being able to shorten the expulsion because the offense involved a knife, not a gun. Hess sensed that Buinger was trying to find a way out.

The outcry wouldn’t stop, though. Hess couldn’t believe the momentum. The national newspapers were calling him now, alerted by a story distributed by Associated Press. The school district was getting crucified. The Hurst Police Department had backed away, deciding not to file a complaint with the county prosecutor. So had the Texas Education Agency, telling AP that local districts did have discretion, that “every case has to be looked at individually.”

Enough, the Hess family resolved. For Taylor, the first couple of times on TV had been neat, but the back-to-back interviews lost their sparkle real quick. For his father, it began to feel like piling on. When would it just become cruel? It wasn’t his intent to ruin the school system, to hurt these people’s careers. He just wanted Taylor back in school.

He would turn down further interviews, Hess decided. He’d take all the reporters’ phone numbers, stick them in his hip pocket. If his family lost their appeal, scheduled for Thursday at 11 a.m., he could always pull them out again.

By Wednesday night, that didn’t seem likely. Early in the evening, the phone rang at the Hess home. It was an assistant superintendent in Gene Buinger’s office. Would the Hesses be agreeable to a 9 a.m. meeting, he wondered, before the scheduled appeal? The district had some ideas. The district thought matters maybe could be resolved.

*

Finding a Way to Bend

In the end, it all came down to what had been lacking, to what everyone said the law didn’t allow: personal judgment.

The federal Gun-Free Schools Act had always included a clause specifying that state laws “shall” allow school superintendents to modify expulsion requirements. The Texas Education Agency, in a letter to district administrators, had made clear that the term of expulsions “may be reduced from the statutory one year.” Yet it was the Hurst-Euless-Bedford district’s own code that governed in the Hess case--and like many others across the country, the HEB district had handcuffed itself by mandating inflexible one-year expulsions.

Now, one day before the Hesses’ appeal, Gene Buinger decided to remove the self-imposed handcuffs. He’d simply waive district policy; he’d rescind the expulsion. Following a conversation with the Texas Education Agency’s school safety division, he thought he could do that, especially since the police had never filed a complaint. And if he could do that, why even hold an appeal hearing?

When the Hesses arrived at his office on Friday morning, Buinger began to explain his plan. Just then, however, an assistant came in carrying a newly arrived fax from the state agency’s legal department. No, the fax advised, Buinger couldn’t rescind the expulsion. He could only reduce the expulsion to time served.

Buinger wasn’t sure whether the Hesses would buy this. He shared with them the conflicting advice he’d received. This does call for expulsion, he said, but we can adjust the amount of time. Is that OK with you?

Robert Hess had a typed list of conditions. “Yes,” he said. “If we can agree on these.”

The Hesses wanted Taylor readmitted immediately to L.D. Bell, his record expunged of any reference to the expulsion, tutorials to help him catch up on missed classes and a public announcement of the resolution. Buinger’s staff readily agreed, but since it was already Thursday, they thought Taylor should come back to Bell on Monday.

No, Robert Hess said. Tomorrow.

Applause greeted the announcement, at an 11 a.m. joint news conference, that Taylor Hess would be returning to L.D. Bell the next morning. Taylor said it hadn’t been “a pleasant experience, but I hold no personal grudges.” Robert Hess said, “What I was hoping for is exactly what I got.” Gene Buinger said, “Zero-tolerance policies have become excessive.... The school board is now undertaking a complete review of district policy. We want to give as much discretion as possible to local administrators so we don’t have to repeat this situation.”

In time, the district would revise its policy, among other things ending the mandatory one-year term for expulsions. All that remained unresolved were the fundamental reasons for zero-tolerance policies in the first place. Gene Buinger knew as much; he knew that if another student had lifted the knife from Taylor’s pickup and used it in an altercation, they would have endured an even more impassioned response. He knew also what he would hear in the next knife-on-campus case: I want the same as Taylor Hess. If I don’t get the same, it’s discrimination.

There were no simple answers. Still, returning to L.D. Bell after the final news conference, Jim Short saw one thing clearly. This day happened to be the occasion for another random security sweep of the campus, complete with drug-sniffing dogs. There they were, out on the parking lot, just as they were the morning they spotted Taylor’s knife. This crew had never found drugs, hardly ever weapons. Littering and tardiness had been the biggest problems at Bell all year.

“No thank you,” Short told the dog handlers. “You’re not going to do this today. Stay out of the parking lot. Stay out of our classes.”

*

On the Web

Videotaped interviews with Taylor Hess, his father, Robert Hess, and L.D. Bell High School Principal Jim Short accompany this story on The Times’ Web site. Go to latimes.com/zero