On Sept. 17, 1999 a brawl broke out at a football game at Eisenhower High School in Decatur, Ill. The mostly white school board expelled seven black students involved in the fight for two years. Some faced criminal charges for their part in the fight. The expulsions triggered protests, marches, and demonstrations led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Black leaders lambasted the board�s decision to expel the students as racist.

On Nov. 19, a brawl broke out between a Black and a white student at Palmdale intermediate school in Palmdale, a suburban community near Los Angeles. The Black student died from injuries that resulted either from a blow to the head from the white student or after hitting his head on the pavement when he fell. The mostly white Palmdale school officials suspended the student for five days. There were no criminal charges filed against him.

The paper-light suspension did not trigger angry marches, protests, and demonstrations. However, Black leaders lambasted the handslap punishment as a glaring example of a racially-tinged double standard by white school officials when a Black student is victimized.

There was no evidence that the fight was racially-motivated. But Black leaders pointed to the spate of racist violence that has rocked the Palmdale area in recent years and culminated in the vicious beating death of a Black homeless man by three Nazi low-riders as proof that hate groups may be everywhere in the area, including on school campuses.

If Decatur school officials grossly overreacted to the violence, it was in part due to the Columbine high school rampage and the horrific wave of shootings at high schools nationally. The shootings stoked public fears that violence-prone youth are running amok on school campuses. School officials everywhere have felt duty-bound to take tough action to assure the public that they are doing something about it. Decatur school officials also overreacted in part due to the ultra-stereotyped branding of young Black males as perennial, murder-and-mayhem, menace-to-society thugs.

If Palmdale school officials grossly underreacted to the violence, they leave themselves wide open to the charge that they are hypocritical, and inconsistent in applying their zero tolerance policy. Under a law passed by the California Legislature in January, 1998 school districts statewide are required to adopt a zero tolerance policy toward illicit student behavior.

The law mandates that a student be expelled for one year for infractions that include drug sales, robbery, assault, weapons possession, and fights that cause serious physical injury to another person. The only exception to the rule is if the student that caused the injury acted in self-defense.

The draconian action by Decatur school officials, and the inaction by Palmdale school officials, raised the bigger question of whether a zero tolerance policy for school violence effectively keeps students and the community out of harms way, or is a repressive tool that victimizes Black and Latino students. The federal Gun Free Schools Act passed in 1994 requires that states boot students out for weapons possession in order to get money under the elementary and secondary education act. School officials quickly expanded the list of violations for student expulsion to include fighting and other violent acts.

Black and Latino students became instant targets of the zero tolerance rules. Some state legislators in California were so alarmed by the lop-sided numbers of Black and Latino students being kicked out of schools that they proposed legislation to sharply limit the power of school districts to expel students.

It went nowhere.

In Decatur, Jesse Jackson railed that consigning the expelled students to an alternative school was no answer. Their punishment, he claimed, would put them hopelessly behind in their studies, stigmatize and embarrass their parents, and further polarize an already hyper-racially charged community.

Palmdale school officials face the same dilemma. If they expel the student involved in the fistfight for a year and banish him to an alternative school, would this do irreparable educational and social damage to him and his parents, and deepen the racial schisms in the area?

The aim of a zero tolerance school policy is to send a hard message to students that violent acts on campus will not be tolerated. But is a zero tolerance message really necessary? Despite media exaggeration of juvenile crime and violence, school-associated shootings have plunged in the past five years. Better and more effective school counseling and mediation programs, and greater parental and teacher involvement are the major reasons for the drop in school violence�not zero tolerance policies.

There is also the danger that an inflexible zero tolerance policy that dumps students into makeshift alternative schools, or worse, on the streets, will push school dropout rates and criminal activity higher.

As it now stands, zero tolerance is nothing more than a momentary Band-Aid solution to school violence that overly penalizes Black and Latino students.

That was the problem in Decatur and it�s the problem in Palmdale.