UNBENDING RULES ON DRUGS IN SCHOOLS DRIVE ONE TEEN TO THE BREAKING POINT

Josh Anderson had just finished four homework assignments. He did his
laundry. He watched TV with his mother -- "House," which he had Tivo'd
for viewing that night. He played with the dogs. Then, at his mom's
urging, he went up to bed. It was 12:30, and the next day, March 19,
was a big one: Josh was scheduled for a hearing that probably would
end with his expulsion from the Fairfax County school system.

The Andersons weren't blind to what got Josh into this pickle. He had
been caught leaving campus, going to Taco Bell with a friend. When the
boys returned to South Lakes High in Reston, an assistant principal
confronted them in the parking lot, smelled marijuana and had the car
searched. This was the second time in two years that Josh, a junior,
had been found with pot.

"I really have been working hard on this," Josh wrote to the hearing
officers. "I can't believe I'm putting my parents through this now. I
can't believe how selfish and stupid I've been. . . . I'm honestly
going to try my hardest to fix this."

The Andersons were told that Josh would be barred from any regular
Fairfax high school and might be tossed out of the system entirely.
His parents were looking into private schools or moving.

But there would be no hearing, no new school, no more visits from
college football coaches asking about Josh's talents.

When Sue Anderson went into her son's room the next morning, he was
dead. Without a word to his girlfriend, parents, psychologist, coach
or teachers, Josh Anderson, 17, had killed himself.

He left a note, just two lines. "Why does it have to be like this?"
And, to his girlfriend, "I love you."

There is little anger in Tim and Sue Anderson's voices now. Waves of
grief strike at random intervals. Their eyes water when they look up
the stairs toward Josh's room in their house in Vienna. They don't
want to sue anyone. They praise coaches and teachers at South Lakes
who did what they could to help their boy. But they have come to
believe that the system did Josh a terrible wrong, that the
zero-tolerance mentality contradicts the goal of educating or helping
an immature adolescent.

"No one can ever answer whether Fairfax County was responsible for
what Josh did," says Tim Anderson. "But they pushed him closer to the
edge than he needed to be." The parents know their son's often-silent
manner masked emotional troubles, but he had been in counseling, both
through the school system and privately, and no one saw this coming.
The trauma of facing expulsion, the Andersons believe, was just too
much for their son.

In Fairfax, possession of marijuana on school grounds means automatic
suspension and a recommendation of expulsion. "There's no discretion
at the school level," says Paul Regnier, spokesman for the system.
"Virginia law requires that if there's possession of marijuana on
school grounds, the student must be expelled unless there are special
circumstances."

The Andersons' living room is a makeshift shrine to a boy everyone
half expects to be there the next morning. Josh's football helmets
frame the coffee table, which is crowded with his photos. A friend
collected dozens of Facebook tributes and made a book for his parents.
More than a thousand people -- many of them kids from South Lakes and
Langley, which Josh attended before he was caught with pot the first
time -- attended the funeral. The kids still come by, some just to sit
in Josh's room. Some ask if they can take something to remember him
by.

It can seem like mere chance that those kids are here and Josh is a
collection of memories. (Sue is recording those at
http://rememberingjosh.blogspot.com). "If they searched every backpack
and car at Langley and South Lakes, what portion of the students would
be suspended and sent to other schools?" Sue asks.

The county's survey of students from eighth to 12th grades suggests
that the number would be large: 22 percent said they have used
marijuana, 10 percent within the past 30 days.

Tim and Sue "don't in any way condone what Josh did," the father says.
"It was totally boneheaded, and he should have been punished." But
Fairfax's rules make no distinction between a kid who is using drugs
and one who is dealing. The Andersons say a system that immediately
escalates a case to the county level strips families and schools of
the chance to work together to help a teen.

State law requires drug cases to be handled at the central hearing
office, says Fairfax School Board member Jane Strauss. "The
zero-tolerance structure is a response to the choices voters have made
and to the huge outcry for dealing with drugs on school grounds. The
tighter expectations used to be in the private schools. But starting
in the early 1980s, there were much tougher rules in the public
schools. Now, the toughest rules are in public schools, while there's
more give in the private schools."

The goal, Strauss says, "is to save souls, to help kids get through
adolescence." In Josh's case, which Strauss would not discuss, his
parents say the counseling programs he was assigned to were helpful.
But Strauss concedes that "I cannot say there are the very best
therapeutic situations available for all children" in the system. "We
try, but there are unfortunate tragic situations."

That, of course, is not good enough. Parents of kids who do wrong will
always argue that schools should be at least as flexible and
understanding of adolescents as we are of adults who commit similar
offenses. And parents of other kids at those schools will always
contend that those who bring drugs to school need to be dealt with in
clear, strong terms.

The system's job is both to punish and to educate. Zero-tolerance
rules make life easier for bureaucrats and lawyers, but they make no
sense in the jumbled world of teenagers. Some kids are poisonous to
their peers and need to be removed for the good of all. Others need an
individualized blend of punishment, counseling and connection with the
people who know them best -- in some cases, at their own school.

"I'm sure I'll ask myself what I could have done until the day I die,"
Sue Anderson says. "Maybe we could have done more, but the policies
right now are one-size-fits-all, designed to get rid of hard-core drug
dealers. It's too late for us, frankly, but are we treating these kids
as we would like to be treated?"