To the editor: In your last issue you published

To the editor:

In your last issue you published a letter from Mrs. Arlene Frye entitled “Parent Charges Discrimination.” As a member of the School Board, Mrs. Frye’s letter deeply disturbs me.

Mrs. Frye addresses these subjects: (1) The School Board and Administration are said to be too harsh in the sactions imposed for violation of our adopted Drug and Alcohol Policy, that we are punishing these children “to the limit” and (2) that, in administering the policy, the Administration and the Board are discriminatory to the extent that “there is no justice at all,” and (3) the Board should “take a long and hard look” at the current disciplinary system.

I agree with Mrs. Frye’s concerns in part; in part I do not.

On item (1), I do not agree with her. Indeed, the very opposite of her argument is the case. To say that suspension for three days (which had already occurred before the promptly-held hearing) and an exhortation to the student and her parents that the student must display “exemplary behavior” up to a certain date (as “punishment”) — these sanctions are, I say, rediculously light ones. What is exemplary behavior? What kind of behavior do we expect when the stated period runs out? Non-exemplary behavior? These sanctions don’t constitute even a good “slap on the wrists.” In fact, the disciplinary committee hardly “reached out to touch somebody.”

As far as sanctions or punishment are concerned, the Board does try to “make the punishment fit the crime.” Neither the Board’s disciplinary committee nor the full Board is willing to come down with equal punishment in the case of a boy or girl who unknowingly, unwittingly and without any desire to do so, is, by trickery, induced to take a sip of vodka or gin from a “coke” bottle, as opposed to the case of a boy or girl who knowlingly, willingly and in defiance of the Board’s pub