Matthew Whalen, the Lansingburgh, NY, Eagle Scout and aspiring West Point cadet who was suspended from school for 20 days last month for having a small knife in his car, will not have his punishment expunged from his permanent record, the Troy Record reports.
Matthew Whalen
The news, although disappointing, is not surprising. The Record reported last week that the board had made a decision but neither side would discuss the outcome. That was a bad sign.

Whalen's parents say they plan to appeal the local school board's decision to the state board of education. But it's unlikely that young Whalen will have any satisfaction before he heads off to college. From the Troy Record story:

"This could take up to one year, so it may be a moot point by time a decision is made by the state, but it’s about the principle of the matter," said Bryan Whalen, Matthew’s father, regarding the appeals process with the state Education Department. The family plans to file the appeal by next week.

About 170 appeals cases were decided on by the state last year on various topics, though there were 30 related to knives from the past 17 years, said spokesman Tom Dunn.

"It is not uncommon for the commissioner to receive appeals regarding the appropriateness of a school district’s actions," he said, adding that many are thrown out.

The Whalen story is stranger and somewhat less clear-cut than that of Zachary Christie, the Delaware first-grader who was suspended and nearly sent to reform school for bringing a Cub Scout camping tool to school. That was clearly a dumb decision by school officials, and the school board was right to change district policy to ensure such a farce wouldn't be repeated.

I think the Whalen case as reported should lead one to essentially the same conclusion. (Here's the Albany Times-Union's story about the board's decision.) One interpretation of the Lansingburgh board's decision might be that members didn't want to appear to cave to public or media pressure -- Fox News flogged the story for a couple of weeks, don't forget. Rules are rules and zero tolerance means just that. And it doesn't matter whether Whalen is a good kid or if he wants to go to West Point; we need to maintain order, by God! George Goodwin, Lansingburgh's mindless bureaucratic automaton of a superintendent, made noises along those lines to the press before retreating into his office, barring the door and shuttering the windows.

As it happens, another Lansingburgh High School student, a 14-year-old girl, was arrested Monday and charged with misdemeanor criminal possession of a weapon for bringing a knife to school. There are significant differences between her story and Whalen's. From the Record story:

The 14-year-old female student, whose name was not released, allegedly brought a folding knife blade in her jeans pocket "in anticipation of a fight," according to a police incident report.

The blade, which was not attached to a handle, was found in her pocket after she was involved in an altercation around 1:20 p.m. Monday, according to the report. It does not appear that anyone was injured.

Sounds reasonable. By contrast, Whalen's knife was smaller, he wasn't carrying it and he was not involved in a fight at the time; it was in his car and he seems to have been minding his own business when confronted by his vice principal. And although school officials did call the police, Whalen wasn't arrested or charged with any crime because New York State law doesn't consider a knife under 2-1/2 inches to be a weapon.

But one odd, recent detail about Whalen's story gives me pause and begs for further explanation: "One of his schoolmates, an alleged gang member with the Goonies, was purportedly the one who notified school security about the knife..." I made fun of the gang's name in a previous post. But what I don't understand is what precipitated this so-called gangster's revelation to school officials. Did Whalen have a run in with this gang, assuming it really is a gang and not a bunch of goofballs screwing around? Did that play a role in the superintendent's decision to extend Whalen's punishment from five days to 20 and the board's vote to affirm the suspension?

I still believe that Whalen likely got rolled by an idiotic bureaucracy divorced from common sense. But nobody should confuse opposing mindless, insipid zero-tolerance policies with opposing order and discipline in schools. As I wrote in my Sacramento Bee op-ed about the Whalen case and the idiocy of zero-tolerance policies in general, "students and teachers shouldn't have to wonder whether the kid in the back of the class is packing heat.... But zero-tolerance rules shouldn't serve as an excuse for officials to absolve themselves from using their intelligence. If nothing else, it's a terrible lesson and a poor example for kids."

The lesson still holds.

Earlier posts on Matthew Whalen and zero-tolerance:

• Vindication for Zachary Christie
• No vindication for Matthew Whalen... yet
• Who is George Goodwin?
• Where is the school board on Lansingburgh's insipid, mindless zero-tolerance policy?
• Well, OF COURSE Lansingburgh school administrators overreacted
• Vindication for Matthew Whalen... maybe soon