Assuming a role usually assigned to parents or police, a growing number of public schools are disciplining students for their misbehavior off campus.
Students driving drunk on a weekend or caught fighting at the mall not only risk arrest and further consequences at home. Now, as the call for safe schools intensifies, they also may be suspended or expelled.
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 teen's school day had ended, and he was running some errands for his mother. The officer found a pipe and marijuana residue that was 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 for the first time 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 off-hours to keep delinquent behavior from creeping onto school grounds.
"We have a new breed of violence standards," said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village, Calif. "Parents, teachers and students are concerned about troublemakers. The public is concerned about school safety."
Practice Raises New Legal Issues
No figures are available on the incidence of such cases. 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 whom the schools are charged to protect?
"School districts believe that they can do whatever they feel like doing," said Veronica Norris, a Tustin lawyer 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."
