Serving the time wasn't a big embarrassing ordeal, Alex says. Most of his friends have had in-school suspension. And it gave him a chance to bond with other guys who were being disciplined.
Alex filed a formal student grievance November 2 concerning his arrest, punishment and expulsion hearing. The school's zero tolerance policy was inappropriately applied, he said, because he didn't have a real knife. His replica was never designed as a weapon, nor was it used as one.
What his parents want is for HISD to admit that the arrest was uncalled-for, to explain why Alex was thrown in jail (who messed up, did they not know the law?), to create guidelines for student arrests at Lamar and to reimburse them for roughly $7,000 in legal expenses ($5,000 for retaining a lawyer, $500 for the bond, the $1,500 lawyer's fee for expunging his record and the $150 expunction fee).
HISD said no.
Ray Reiner, central district superintendent, concluded that HISD "properly followed policies and procedures related to the alleged violations brought forward by Alexander Golubitsky."
"It is my understanding that the case was later dismissed by the D.A.'s office because the weapon was confiscated in the parking lot and not in the building. Being found in the parking lot would not allow it to be treated as a felony, but this does not rule out the fact that the weapon was found on school property, which is an offense subject to expulsion," Reiner wrote. (Like McSwain, Reiner refused to discuss the case with the Press, referring all questions to HISD's public-relations department.)
Okay, but where's the I'm-sorry-we-didn't-know-the-law-and-someone-messed-up-and-arrested-your-kid?
"Having a student arrested who has not broken a law is a problem," Marty says. "Everything else pales when you come down to that. Everyone in the world except HISD finds this somewhere between ridiculous and abhorrent. HISD thinks this is okay."
For the level-three appeals hearing January 8, Alex's parents put together a 52-page packet detailing who they are, who Alex is, what happened and what they want to happen. They included his SAT scores, his transcript filled with A's and B's, a petition signed by 17 parents, and letters from teachers and family friends describing Alex as "marvelously intelligent," quiet, contemplative and trustworthy. The director of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado, who focuses on adolescent and young adult development, wrote that Alex is a person of "sensitivity to social concerns, humaneness toward others, and the highest standards of ethical conduct." One of his teachers wrote that Alex is always on time for class, never skips, sits in the front row, participates in discussion and turns his work in on time. Alex's grandfather, a sociology professor emeritus at Harvard, wrote that although Alex's independent nature might be "construed as fresh or cheeky by teachers, of criminal tendency there is absolutely no trace in his nature or in his record."
Faye Bryant, the deputy superintendent of school administration, ruled that HISD was in the right. The Golubitskys plan to appeal her decision before the school board.
"They seem to be asking us to sue them," Marty says. He worries about the damage to Alex: "You see a life, if not being ruined, detoured." He normally runs a nine-minute morning mile; he's so angry he's down to seven and a half.
They're going to keep fighting. They see civil rights violations, and the Texas ACLU is considering the case.
This is all the family talks about at dinner. Now, instead of visiting friends, seeing movies or doing mathematics, Alex's parents research laws, codes and school rules in the evenings. It's consumed their world.
Alex says he and his parents don't argue over little things anymore. They fight a lot less with each other because now they're fighting together.
Since he was in jail, Alex hasn't been able to get jazzed about schoolwork. It could be senioritis setting in, but once you've been in jail, you can't get all that upset about a bad grade, he says. A 38 on a calculus test used to seem like the end of the world; now he knows there are worse things. He plays Rage Against the Machine's song "Killing in the Name Of" over and over. "Fuck you, I won't do what you told me," is the lyric he likes.
He's decided to keep his hair short; he realizes now how much trouble it was. He thinks that, someday, he wants to be a writer, maybe a political essayist or a George Orwell-type novelist. He's applied to six colleges so far; he's leaning toward Reed College or UCLA-Berkeley. For Reed he wrote one essay outlining the problems he sees in the justice system. In another, he recounted his jail time.
"The police made it seem as though having an illegal knife was worse than selling heroin to little kids," he wrote. "In fact, the crime they charged me with carried a heavier penalty than selling heroin to little kids....
"I'm not sure how much I really learned from this experience. I think that not learning anything from this might be a good thing, because everything that I could have learned would've been bad.
