Zero Tolerance
Page 15
“And my life’s not being destroyed.”
She had never felt as fully alive as she did right now.
“Expelling someone for an innocent mistake?” her father said.
“He knows it’s wrong,” Sierra said. “He just can’t back down. Because he got locked in—”
“And needs to save face,” her father finished the sentence for her. “But he’s going to find out that, guess what, it didn’t work, and he’s never going to be able to show his sorry face in this school district again. And that’s going to be the best thing that has happened to this school district in a long, long time.”
“I don’t want you to do it,” Sierra said.
“I’m your father, and I have to do what I think is right.”
Was it right to destroy someone’s career because he was a pompous hypocrite? Because he was a pompous hypocrite who had driven a car while under the influence of alcohol and might have killed someone?
Why did it matter so much, being right?
“Daddy, if you tell them about Mr. Besser, I’m going to transfer to Beautiful Mountain, whether I get expelled or not. If you try to make me stay at Longwood or go to Braxton, I’ll fail every class on purpose.”
Her father looked as stunned as if Cornflake had quadrupled in size and pounced on the neighbor’s pit bull.
“And who, may I ask, is going to pay your tuition at Beautiful Mountain?”
He had better not add that her mother couldn’t afford to pay it from her income as an unpublished playwright.
“You are,” Sierra told him.
He glanced over at his wife, his eyes steely with anger. “Angie, this is your doing.”
Her mother’s eyes were steely, too. “Having a strong-willed, assertive, feisty daughter is my doing?”
“This Beautiful Mountain crapola is your doing.”
The attorney for the school district poked his head out into the hall.
“Is she feeling better now?” he asked Sierra’s father.
“I’m feeling fine now, thank you,” Sierra said.
“Then the superintendent would like you to come back in so that we can finish this up.”
Sierra led the way back into the hearing room. She didn’t look to see if her father was following her, or to monitor what expression he had on his face.
In the end, her father would do whatever he chose to do.
“Mr. Shepard, you were about to present some new information for my consideration,” the superintendent said once Sierra and her mother were seated again. Her father remained standing in front of the table.
“I have here in my briefcase,” her father said, “some highly relevant news reports.”
Sierra stared down at her lap.
“News reports about how other school districts across the country with strict and absolute zero-tolerance policies have handled similar cases.”
She let out her breath.
“In Tennessee: exception made for a student who had a toy gun in a Civil War diorama. In Minnesota: exception made for a student who brought in a razor blade to cut out paper snowflakes for a collage project in art class. In Oregon: exception made for a student who had her mother’s prescription medication in the wrong lunch bag by mistake.”
He paused for effect.
“In the wrong lunch bag by mistake,” he repeated. “I have seven more cases I could present, instances in which sanity and common sense prevailed over bureaucratic rigidity and foolish face-saving by school officials.”
Here her father did look directly at Mr. Besser with a barely restrained smirk.
“If you’d like, I can continue sharing them with you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Mr. Van Ek said. “Thank you for your very helpful research, Mr. Shepard. Mr. Besser, do you have anything that you would like to add before I make my ruling in this case?”
Mr. Besser didn’t look at Sierra’s father; he looked directly at Sierra, a long inscrutable gaze, and then rose to face Mr. Van Ek.
“I believed, and continue to believe, that I had no option under my school’s stated policies—policies, I repeat, that were consented to in writing by every student and every parent at this school—no option but to enforce those policies conscientiously to the letter of the law. If ‘zero tolerance’ means anything, it has to mean precisely that, however lax other school districts may have been in their interpretation: zero tolerance. Zero tolerance.”
Maybe now Sierra’s father would wave that other news report in Mr. Besser’s plump, bland, self-satisfied face.
“But,” Mr. Besser said, “I can understand and appreciate the grounds for ruling otherwise in this particular case, especially given the outstanding contributions of this particular student. So I will respect your ruling, Mr. Van Ek, whatever it might be.”
Mr. Van Ek nodded judiciously.
“Thank you, Mr. Besser. While my office has the right to review the arguments put forward here for seven days before handing down a ruling, I don’t see any benefit in prolonging the resolution of this unfortunate case.”
Sierra willed her heart to keep on beating. Was there hope for her after all?
“I believe that the new zero-tolerance policies put in place under Tom Besser’s leadership of Longwood Middle School have been significantly responsible for making this school one of the highest-performing middle schools in the state of Colorado.”
Mr. Van Ek didn’t look toward Sierra and her parents as he spoke in defense of all that Mr. Besser had done.
So next Monday Sierra would be starting at Braxton Country Day School, if her father could expedite the admission and registration process in her case. Which she had no doubt he could do. She didn’t know if she could make good on her threat to force him to let her attend Beautiful Mountain.
“But I also believe,” Mr. Van Ek said, “that we should follow the precedents presented to us by Mr. Shepard from our peer districts and permit some very few exceptions. Indeed, Mr. Besser, I would urge you to craft a more carefully worded policy that makes clear that zero tolerance will not apply to accidental violations when the student takes immediate steps to notify school officials of the mistake, as Sierra Shepard did in this case.”
He paused.
“Sierra can stay at Longwood Middle School. She should receive no academic penalties for the time she has already been absent from class, and she should be given every opportunity to make up the work she was forced to miss so that she can continue in her record of outstanding academic achievement.”
It was over.
Her mother, who had been gripping Sierra’s hand throughout Mr. Van Ek’s speech, swept her into a hug.
Her father was grinning. He had, after all, won, and winning was what he loved more than anything else in the world.
No, not more than he loved Sierra. For her, he had given up the exquisite pleasure of squishing Mr. Besser like a bug. Her mother was right. Love was still the chink in her father’s armor.
She watched her father shake Mr. Van Ek’s hand and then offer his hand to Mr. Besser as well. Winners could afford to be generous. He even gave Mr. Besser a playful slap on the shoulder, as if in promise that he held no hard feelings toward the man he had been about to ruin.
Then Mr. Besser came over to Sierra and her mother.
“I’m glad that you’ll be back,” he said warmly. “I couldn’t be more pleased with the superintendent’s decision.”
Did Mr. Besser know that she had saved him?
But if she had saved him, he had also saved her.
“Sierra!” The blond reporter from 9NEWS was calling over to her.
“Go to your adoring fans,” Mr. Besser told her, gesturing toward the cameras at the rear of the room. Then he leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Speaking of adoring fans, you can do better than Luke Bishop, you know.”
Sierra didn’t reply. She was going to text Luke as soon as she was in the car—Luke and Em and Lexi, and maybe even Celeste and Colin, too. And then she was going to go home
and cuddle Cornflake and print out her Mayan culture report and spend a few hours just lying on top of the quilt on her bed, staring up at the canopy over her head. She couldn’t face returning to school until Monday.
“Oh, and Sierra,” Mr. Besser called after her as she was heading over to the waiting reporters. “If you can get a ride from one of your parents to the Springs, I believe you can get there in time to take part in the choir concert. They’re taking the stage this afternoon at four.”
“I can drive her,” Sierra’s mother said. Sierra gave her mother a grateful hug.
She thought of the banner hanging in the front office with its appliquéd inscription.
RULES
RESPECT
RESPONSIBILITY
RELIABILITY
Now she could add REGRET.
And RETHINKING A WHOLE BUNCH OF THINGS.
And most of all RELIEF.
For the first time, she was glad that the R in RELIABILITY was a little bit crooked.
Everything in her life was a little bit more crooked than it used to be.
And right now, as far as Sierra was concerned, that was completely and totally and wonderfully okay.
Also by Claudia Mills
Losers, Inc.
Standing Up to Mr. O.
You’re a Brave Man, Julius Zimmerman
Lizzie at Last
Alex Ryan, Stop That!
Perfectly Chelsea
Makeovers by Marcia
Trading Places
The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish
One Square Inch
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010
Copyright © 2013 by Claudia Mills
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2013
eBook edition, June 2013
macteenbooks.com
Mills, Claudia.
Zero tolerance / Claudia Mills. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“Margaret Ferguson books.”
Summary: Seventh-grade honor student Sierra Shepard faces expulsion after accidentally bringing a paring knife to school, violating the school’s zero-tolerance policy.
ISBN 978-0-374-33312-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-374-38832-4 (e-book)
[1. Middle schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M63963Ze 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012017851
eISBN 9780374388324