By Marilyn Elias
                   USA TODAY, December 11, 2000

                   Contrite parents used to come to the principal's office and apologize if a child
                   had broken school rules. The youngster was sure to hear plenty about his
                   behavior at home.

                   Now the scenario is dramatically different, veteran educators say. School
                   officials -- not the misbehaving kids -- often are the ones who catch the brunt
                   of parental fury.

                   ''A few years ago, we started seeing a change,'' says Marla Shwarts, dean of
                   students at South High School in Torrance, Calif. ''Now they get angry at us,
                   and the first thing they say is 'You did something wrong' or even 'You'll be
                   hearing from my attorney.' 

                   ''This kind of reaction used to be rare. Now it's the opposite. More frequently
                   than not, parents are adversarial.''

                   Shwarts, 50, oversees discipline at the upper-middle-class school in
                   suburban Los Angeles.

                   Across the nation ''there's been a revolution in parental attitudes toward
                   teachers and schools,'' says psychologist William Damon, director of the
                   Stanford University Center on Adolescence. ''There's less respect. Parents
                   are going to school acting like lawyers or agents for their kids.''

                   Damon travels constantly, speaking with school employees and parents.

                   ''I can't tell you how many times I've heard about kids cheating, plagiarizing,
                   even stealing. The teacher's trying to tell the child what a serious thing it is
                   and that he'll have to be disciplined,'' Damon says. ''Then parents undermine
                   that. They say, 'My child isn't being fairly treated. Everybody in school
                   cheats. He's just being loyal to friends.' They make excuses, let their kids off
                   the hook. Nowadays, there's almost a knee-jerk protectiveness.''

                   Parents have become so intrusive and adversarial that this fall a group of
                   more than 100 independent schools in the Washington, D.C.-Maryland area
                   released a code for civil conduct between parents and schools. 

                   By enrolling their child in a school, parents ''agree to subscribe to its mission,
                   follow its rules and abide by its decisions,'' the policy states. While
                   supporting ''constructive'' disagreement with school decisions, the code says
                   that parents ''should not expect the Board of Trustees to act as an appeals
                   board'' and warns that it's ''counterproductive'' to lobby other parents. 

                   If ''the parent cannot remain a constructive member of the (school) community
                   . . . both the parent and the school should consider whether another school
                   would be a better match.'' 

                   Nowadays, in public and private schools, even slight rebukes to young
                   students can send protective parents racing in to complain.

                   ''It's the dark side of the soccer mom,'' says Fred Grossman, a school
                   psychologist in Beaverton, Ore. ''Middle-class parents are overinvolved in their
                   child's life. Their lives almost become merged, and it never used to be like
                   this. It's like life or death if anything bad happens to their child.''

                   Some think the ''my kid, right or wrong'' approach reflects a compensatory
                   urge, prompted by guilt over long hours away from youngsters. Parents now
                   spend about 11 fewer hours a week with their children than parents did in
                   1960, according to a National Research Council report last year.

                   On the discipline front, ''parents who are most militant for zero tolerance on
                   drugs and alcohol are exactly the ones who will turn on a dime when their
                   own kids are involved,'' says Richard Jung, headmaster at the Bullis School in
                   Potomac, Md. ''They'll go after the teacher, the rule. They'll go after board
                   members. They'll bring in the lawyers.'' 

                   They demand strict rules because they're so protective of their kids, and they
                   remain protective if a youngster gets caught, he suggests.

                   The changing legal climate is a key factor encouraging parental activism,
                   parents and educators agree.

                   For example, under recently tightened federal laws, public schools can't
                   suspend youngsters with a learning disability or emotional disorder for more
                   than 10 days in a school year without a hearing to determine whether the
                   misconduct was caused by the disability.

                   ''It amounts to jumping through hoops, so most districts stick to the 10 days,''
                   says Julie Weatherly, an Atlanta lawyer who represents many school
                   systems.

                   A growing number of parents are getting their kids diagnosed with such
                   conditions as attention deficit disorder (ADD), Weatherly says. They then
                   claim any misbehavior was caused by the disability and demand special
                   academic programs, as required by law.

                   ''I have one case where a middle school girl was starting fights and setting
                   fires. They claim it's because she has ADD, but plenty of kids with ADD don't
                   do stuff like that,'' she says. ''We see a lot of children who aren't ADD. They're
                   B-A-D, and their parents are using the law to exempt their kids from
                   discipline.'' 

                   Deborah Crockett, a school psychologist in Fayette County, Ga., says,
                   ''Some of the special-ed claims are legitimate, a lot are not.'' Her pet peeve: ''I
                   call them 'the Stepford special-ed kids' because there are templates out there
                   on the Internet, cookbook ways for how to qualify your kid no matter what,
                   and parents use them. The fact is, these kids have safeguards that other kids
                   don't; they're much more difficult to expel.''

                   To help prevent problems, her district started parent classes three years ago
                   on such hot-button topics as ''Living and Parenting in an Indulged Community''
                   and ''Handling Childhood Anger.'' 

                   There are valid reasons to be more concerned than in the past if a youngster's
                   high jinks end up on a permanent record. Getting into college is more
                   competitive than ever, and parents fear that their children will lose a
                   competitive advantage, Jung says.

                   Also, studies show that children with disabilities are more likely than
                   classmates to be suspended, says Indiana University education researcher
                   Russell Skiba. So parents of those kids are justified in protesting undue
                   punishment, he says.

                   Discipline-related lawsuits against school districts have increased in recent
                   years, experts say. Most don't come to trial, but when they do, ''students are
                   losing these cases right and left,'' says Perry Zirkel, an education law expert
                   at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. 

                   ''There is more litigation because there is more at stake,'' Zirkel says. Instead
                   of minor punishments, many youngsters now face automatic expulsion. 

                   As reports grow of schools throwing out kids for such offenses as bringing
                   nail clippers to school and sharing Midol with classmates, critics of zero
                   tolerance think parents are right to challenge harsh policies. They point to
                   cases like that of Kurt Armstrong of Collingswood (N.J.) High School, who
                   typed a joke message into a school computer and was expelled for making a
                   bomb threat. His mother fought the decision and won, but only after Kurt
                   spent his junior year at a different school in another state (story, 9D).

                   Many observers see an atmosphere of ugly polarization developing around
                   school discipline. On the one side are parents leaping to the defense of their
                   princes and princesses, no matter what, using lawsuits as clubs to intimidate
                   financially strapped public schools. On the other are enforcers of rigid rules
                   designed to protect districts from charges of arbitrary punishment and quell
                   fears of violence.

                   ''Good judgment has been thrown out the window,'' Stanford's Damon says.
                   ''Districts either are walking away from it, caving in or coming down like a ton
                   of bricks on every kid.''

                   The big loser here: children. ''If all we do is finger-point -- parents blame the
                   schools, schools blame the parents, and everyone blames the government --
                   then we go round in circles,'' says Ted Feinberg of the National Association of
                   School Psychologists. 

                   ''It's obvious that schools and parents share some of the blame for what's
                   happened, and both are going to have to take responsibility to solve this
                   problem.'' 

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