This is too funny. A principal gets busted on a zero tolerance policy at an airport. The zero tolerance policies at schools are absolutely completely braindead. I have no sympathy for the principal. But apparently she doesn’t like being on the receiving end of such a policy. Too bad.
Maybe now she’ll see the reasoning for movements like End Zero Tolerance. Maybe.
What would happen if it was a student who accidentally left a knife in her car and then drove that car to school? What if a student accidentally lost a knife in the bottom of here book bag?
Trouble for school principal after bread knife found in baggage
12:21 PM PDT on Wednesday, June 1, 2005
By RAY LANE / KING 5 News
DES MOINES, Wash.-- A middle school principal from Des Moines, Wash., said she has just been fined and put on a terrorist watch-list after airport screeners found a bread knife that she mistakenly left in her carry-on luggage.
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“I had checked the bag several times, and for some reason I got into the pocket a little bit wrong, I couldn’t feel it,” said Cecilia Beaman, principal of Pacific Middle School.
Beaman thought she had lost the small bread knife, which had a rounded tip and serrated edge. But it ended up hidden in a carry-on cooler that was found by a security screener at Los Angeles International Airport.
Workers from the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) told her: "You’ve committed a felony, you are going to be fined $500, you’re going to be a terrorist watch list,” Beaman said.
Cecilia Beaman is worried about being on a terrorist watch list.
This past weekend she and several other chaperones took 37 students to Los Angeles for a band competition.
Beaman said the knife was used to make snacks and sandwiches. But she the TSA rushed to judgment, declaring her guilty on the spot and refusing to even give her a copy of the report they were writing about her.
“They said, ‘It’s national security,’ but I said, ‘it’s about me,’” she said. “They said, ‘It doesn’t make any difference’. I said, ‘What about my constitutional rights?’ They just looked at me and said: ‘You don’t have any rights now.’”
But TSA officials said when it comes to threatening to put someone on a terrorist watch list: “We don’t do that.” They said police are called in to handle the situation, not security screeners and that the passenger is “given a choice to have the knife confiscated or put in their checked luggage.”
They also said every incident is handled on a “case-by-case basis.”
Beaman’s co-workers have jokingly posted a “Most Wanted” poster on her office door. But she said what happened to her is downright sad.
“There are all levels of infractions and they jumped to the grand slammer when it could have been handled in a different way,” she said.
She’s now worried about being flagged on watch lists every time she flies. She also said there’s no way she’s paying the $500 fine.
But TSA officials told KING 5 that as far as they’re concerned this incident was a “non-event,” something they deal with everyday.
TSA tried to put the knife in Beaman’s checked luggage for her flight back to Seattle but it was too late.