11/25/2025
I had a student years ago who was given in-school suspension for defending herself. The story was simple:
A boy pushed her.
She told him to stop.
He grabbed her wrists.
She told him to stop.
He didn’t.
So she dropped him with a clean, sharp kick that ended the discussion.
I wrote about it then because it mattered, and here I am again, because it’s happened again, with another young girl who did everything right and still paid the price for it.
Different year. Different school. Same broken system.
She didn’t escalate. She didn’t provoke. She didn’t act out of anger. She defended her boundaries when the adults tasked with protecting her refused to.
And what’s her reward? Suspension.
So what’s her takeaway supposed to be? What are other girls supposed to learn? What about kids who freeze because they’ve spent their whole lives being told to wait for help that isn’t coming?
Zero tolerance is the abdication of responsibility masquerading as policy.
It’s a shortcut for people who don’t want to think, don’t want to lead, and don’t want to apply nuance. It creates victims and emboldens the very behavior it claims to deter.
Telling a child they’re wrong for defending their own body is one of the fastest ways to create an adult who second-guesses themselves when it matters most.
Not here.
Here, we teach kids to fight when the moment calls for a fight.
Sometimes that means working harder to get into a trade school or college. Sometimes it means asking for a raise. Sometimes it means confronting depression. Sometimes it means stepping in for someone weaker. And sometimes, like in this case, it means slapping the kid who didn’t understand the word stop.
Self-defense isn’t violence. Self-defense is agency.
Agency is something we will never punish.
By the way, I’m picking up something for her this week: a gift card, a note, something simple. Not as a reward for fighting, but as a reminder of this:
She wasn’t wrong.
She wasn’t the problem.
And she damn sure isn’t alone.
