Zero Tolerance

by Claudia Mills

Genre: Realistic fiction
Age: 11+

Sierra Shepherd is in 7th grade, and is probably the best model student ever. She's in Leadership Club, helped to sew the banner displaying Longwood Middle School's four values (Rules, Respect, Responsibility and Reliability), always gets straight A's and always - ALWAYS! - follows the rules. So when she opens her lunchbox at school one day and finds she accidentally brought her mother's identical one rather than her own and finds that it contains a paring knife, she - naturally - turns it in to the lunch lady, expecting to hear a "Thank you for being responsible. We'll contact your mother immediately." But Sierra's school has a Zero Tolerance policy - absolutely NO drugs and NO weapons, with NO exceptions and NO excuses. Even if it was just an accident and Sierra just wanted to hand it in. Now she's facing an expulsion, and is spending her days in in-school suspension... with the "bad" kids. But soon she starts to realize that they aren't juvenile delinquents... nor is she the most perfect student in the school.

The author of this book brought up an issue that actually happens today and crafted a totally real story about it. My dad actually read an article in The Economist about the same thing Zero Tolerance talks about - zero tolerance policies in schools. There were some pretty strange things in the article that qualified for expulsion or suspension. For example, according to the article, The Perils of Peanut-Tossing, a school with a dress code of black shoes decided the situation was major enough to bring in the police when a five-year-old boy who didn't have black shoes wore red shoes colored in with black Sharpie, and red splotches were still visible. And talking about firing a Hello Kitty soap bubble gun earned a suspension. Is it really OK to suspend young children for such minor reasons as this? Is it worth it? Besides all that, Zero Tolerance is written is a really engaging way, and I also enjoyed seeing how Sierra and her view of herself and others changed throughout the course of the book. This is a novel where that is very, very true.