Where is 2nd chance for kids?

So it looks like Randy Dorn is going to get a second chance.

After spending Monday night and part of Tuesday in jail, the state schools' chief now goes back to his job and gets a shot to make things right.

If only we had the same kind of faith in the state's students.

Dorn, as you probably heard, was busted for drinking too much beer and then trying to drive home late one night in March.

The cop pulled him over for a broken taillight, and Dorn was too inebriated to pass the "Walk and Turn" and other sobriety tests.

When this news first came out, Dorn made some flimsy statements about how sorry he was. It's fine to apologize, but I figured he was going to follow the usual shuck-and-jive rules for political survival. Which are: Beg for forgiveness without ever being honest about what you did, all the while wriggling like a worm to get off the hook. Instead, the first time he appeared in court, last Friday, Dorn did what no attorney would advise. He copped to it.

"I drank alcohol and got behind the wheel of a car," Dorn said, pleading guilty.

Wow, that's an act practically unheard of in this age of the phony apology and non-denial denial. Somebody said: "I did it."

So Tuesday Dorn completed his one day jail sentence. He can't drive for 90 days, has to go to alcohol-awareness class and was fined $866 plus costs and assessments.

I don't know Dorn and can't vouch for his motivations. I do know he probably could have gotten off easier than this. Ask any DUI lawyer — because Dorn has no record and his blood-alcohol level was relatively low, the chances of getting the charge either reduced or dismissed were good.

But he took his medicine. It's important, to me anyway, in deciding whether someone deserves a second chance. Was he straight up or did he try to weasel out?

It's not a consideration, a nuance, that we extend to kids in many of the schools.

Take the alcohol policy in, say, the Issaquah School District. There, drinking gets you kicked out for a minimum of 10 days. If you are on a sports team, just being around underage drinking — even if you are not drinking yourself — makes you ineligible for the entire season.

It's zero tolerance. I'm not singling out Issaquah — schools around the state have similar policies. The zero part of the tolerance is that it doesn't matter if you're honest about the mistakes you made or there are mitigating circumstances.

Sometimes these black-and-white policies can work. Other times they lead to absurdities. In February, a Yakima kindergartner ran afoul of a zero-tolerance-for-violence policy and got expelled for pretend-shooting too much with his fingers.

What zero tolerance has done nationally is sharply increase the rates at which kids are kicked out of school.

So we give the kids a bigger punishment that we're willing to give ourselves.

Locally, a lot of the kids end up at TeamChild, a group that tries to help kids out of delinquency and back into school.

The executive director, Anne Lee, told me that a bunch of groups have for years been urging the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction — Dorn's office — as well as local school districts to move away from zero tolerance.

"Kids are at a developmental level, where they're just learning what's right and wrong," Lee said. "They make mistakes. The focus should be on counseling and dropout prevention, not pushing them out."

In other words: A second chance. At least giving them the opportunity to earn one.

Dorn is human. He deserves a second chance. But if that's good enough for the adult running the schools, it ought to be good enough for the kids.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.