Weapon's Grade Cosmetic Devices

Pulp, December 5, 2003

Her eyes filled with tears, Shelly Stanley was unable to finish reading the speech she had prepared for the public hearing before the Pittsburgh School Board last Monday. Her distress was understandable -- her daughter, Shawnee Stanley, was in very serious trouble. Shawnee had just been arrested and expelled for bringing a weapon to her school, Letsche Alternative Education Center, to which she had been sent after failing some of her classes at Carrick High School. Shelly Stanley had come to ask the board to reevaluate its decision, claiming that neither she nor her daughter had ever imagined that an eyebrow archer would be considered a weapon.

An eyebrow archer resembles an ordinary razor for shaving the face or legs. It has the same thin handle about six inches long, and the blade is about half as long as an ordinary razor's, tilted vertically instead of horizontally, with a plastic safety guard to prevent injury. It is used to shape eyebrows by shaving unwanted hair away.

"My daughter, like many girls her age, is what you would call an amateur cosmetologist," Stanley said later. She said Shawnee had used the eyebrow archer to shape the eyebrows of her friends on numerous occasions.

On Wednesday, October 29, the security officer at Letsche discovered the archer in Shawnee's purse, after it had set off the metal detector, and brought her to the vice principal's office, where it was determined that the eyebrow archer was in fact a weapon.

Rule number six of the Pittsburgh School District's student code of conduct states that any student found carrying a weapon will be expelled for at least a year. The term "weapon" is defined as "any knife, cutting instrument, cutting tool, nunchaku, firearm, shotgun, and rifle, and any other tool, instrument, or implement, capable of inflicting serious bodily injury." Letsche school officials called Shelly Stanley to inform her that her daughter would be suspended for 10 days and faced possible expulsion. Two hours later school officials called to tell her that Shawnee, who had just turned 18 two days before, and was thus no longer considered a minor, had been handcuffed and was about to be taken to Allegheny County Jail, where Shelly says her daughter spent seven hours before she was released following her arraignment.

"At first I thought it was a joke," says Stanley. "I talked to [police officers], lawyers, doctors, I even called the manufacturing company -- everyone thought it was a joke. None of them said they would call this a weapon."

Neither would airports. Even after the tightening of security after September 11, especially surrounding objects that could potentially be used to cut another person, passengers are still allowed to bring razors and eyebrow archers onto a plane, as long as they have a safety guard, just like Shawnee's eyebrow archer had. After examining eyebrow archers at a drugstore, it seems like a violent student could do as much damage with a sharpened pencil or a heavy book bag as they could with an eyebrow archer.

Because of district rules, the principal and vice principal of Letsche Alternative Education Center were unable to comment on the events that led to Shawnee's expulsion. A spokesperson for the school board said she was not familiar enough with the facts of the case to comment, but did state that the school and the district were simply enforcing a state zero tolerance law towards weapons possession in school.

Shawnee Stanley's expulsion is a troubling example of just how strict the school district's zero tolerance policy toward weapons and illegal drugs really is. "Zero tolerance" policies were first initiated on the federal level by the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act, which was passed in response to several widely publicized school shootings. Pennsylvania and many other states have gone beyond the federal act by implementing tough policies that mandate immediate suspension or expulsion for students carrying almost any object that might be considered or resemble a weapon or drugs. As a result of these new rules the percentage of students suspended per year has doubled since previous decades, even though students are reporting crime at roughly the same rates as they were in the 1970s. Last year the New York Times reported that in Philadelphia public schools, 33 kindergartners were suspended under a strict new policy, and in another school district an 11-year-old died of asthma because he wasn't allowed to carry his inhaler.

Shelly Stanley is outraged that her daughter's school and the school district had so much discretion over what could be considered a weapon. "They kept saying that word -- 'discretion,'" she says. "How am I supposed to know what their discretion is? Do you really think that I, as a parent, knowing that this was a weapon would say, 'Sure, bring it to school, get arrested'?" She hopes that, in addition to allowing her daughter to return to school, the school board will investigate its policy and make clear to parents and students what would be considered a weapon.

"I don't want any parent to have to go through what I've gone through with my daughter," she says.