Harlem blew it; balloon discipline much too harsh

October 19, 2006
Opinion


There’s only one suitable response to the story about the two Harlem High School students who were arrested, handcuffed and taken to the Winnebago County Jail for taking two homecoming balloons and releasing them outside the school.

Oh, for Pete’s sake! Talk about overreaction!

Since when did getting yelled at by the principal lose its oomph?

When did peer disapproval lose its power to embarrass?

And when did parental discipline and restitution lose their appeal as appropriate disciplinary measures for minor wrongdoing?

Principals still have power to chastise. The potential of peer pressure in behavior modification is unparalleled. Parents can yell, ground, take away the car keys and order restitution.

But emancipating a couple of balloons that belonged to somebody else is not a gateway crime to armed robbery. Treating it as such shows a lapse in judgment by the Harlem administration and sets a poor example for kids of mature, measured decision making.

Two senior girls, Heather Finney and Jessica Pirrello, found a couple of helium-filled Mylar balloons floating in a hallway at their school last Thursday. They say they did not know that the $10 balloons had been specially ordered for Harlem’s homecoming activities. On a lark, the girls grabbed the balloons and sent them into the wild blue yonder.

They were busted by school cameras.

The principal, Joe Hazen, asked the sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school to arrest the girls and take them to jail. Pirrello called home from the women’s section of the jail pleading for someone to come get her. They were fingerprinted and photographed.

We’ve seen the women’s section of the county jail, and few parents would want their high-school-age daughters to end up there. Take our word for this. Putting two high school girls through that trauma for a minor offense was gross overkill.

On top of that, the girls were prohibited from attending homecoming activities and suspended from school. The state’s attorney’s office declined to prosecute the girls, as they already had been punished at school. Good call.

No one is saying that this little prank was harmless or that the girls should not have been punished. The homecoming committee was said to be upset when the two balloons went missing, and it didn’t deserve to have its well-laid plans disrupted. However, committee members will be exceedingly lucky if life does not hand them bigger disappointments at some juncture. The balloons were replaced and homecoming went on as planned.

Finney and Pirrello deserved to get lectured sternly by the principal. They deserved to have their parents called at work to come and lecture them some more and impose discipline. They should have been forced to pay for the balloons and maybe do the equivalent of several hours of community service at the school. They even deserved a certain amount of disapproval from their peers.

But their punishment did not fit the so-called crime in this case. The administration didn’t send a message of zero tolerance for bad behavior.

It sent a message of zero understanding of young people and their predictable foibles.

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