BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Is forging a hall pass a felony?

If the pass falls into the hands of other students, then is it a felony?

Are today's teen-agers so out of hand that the best way to deal with them is through cops and courts?

Whey do you punish? When do you prosecute? Or is the question the same?

These are the issues that come to mind in the case of Kevin Prentice, a Lakota High School student who had a fake pass printed up, used it, and initially faced fifth-degree felony charges for forgery.

Later, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. He received a suspended sentence of 180 days in jail, a fine reduced from $750 to $250,and 80 hours of community service. He was also suspended three days from school, and his parents devised their own penalties at home.

No one is defending Kevin's right to deceive, the purpose of a fake pass.

Nobody feels comfortable thinking any kid, even an 18-year-old, can be off on his own, without anyone knowing his whereabouts, which a fake pass allows. It's just not that kind of world any more.

Nobody wants to see one kid's bad decision involve other kids as well, which could have happened.

And nobody wants to see a kid give a teacher or principal one more headache. They put up with enough already.

Those are areas of general agreement.

What might have happened

Then there are areas of general speculation, the bane of living in a world full of litigation, and seemingly innocent acts that end in disaster.

So we wonder, what if Kevin gave the passes to friends? What if someone ditched school and had an automobile accident? What if somebody committed a crime? What if somebody sued?

Soon, the fact that none of those things happened seems almost insignificant.

But if we hold back our fears, if we look only at what did happen, and if we look at Kevin as a single kid caught in misconduct - not as a precedent for his peers - we may view the incident differently.

Forging hall passes is not a new brand of teen-age terrorism. We don't have to like it, but some of us have to admit we've done it. In my high school, you made sure you had a friend who worked in the office who could pull your attendance card so you weren't counted tardy or absent. If you were, you occasionally faked a note from home, or faked one for a friend.

There's nothing glorious or funny about it. It was a dumb thing to do. But I was a kid, and from time to time, my friends and I did it. We knew we deserved to be punished, and when we were caught, we were. And it wasn't fun. But it wasn't 180 days in jail, either.

If every kid is a threat

One thing we always knew is that no one thought of us as criminals. Even though we followed on the heels of the late 1960s - when young people burned buildings and draft cards - we knew adults expected us to do right and believed, with a little hard steering from time to time, that ultimately we would.

We simply weren't allowed to give up on life so early, and nobody gave up on us. We were given a little more time and space to grow up, and, in the mean time, sometimes to mess up.

It's true that kids mess up bigger today. There are felons in high schools. There are cases where kids should be taken from schools in handcuffs and charged with serious crimes. And those charges - such as assaults on teachers or other students - should never be bargained down (although sometimes they are).

But there are other cases where we use the felony threat too easily and too often. What is essentially a disciplinary problem becomes a crime. An internal matter becomes a court case.

Nobody blames schools for getting sick and tired of dealing with kids who break the rules, buck authority, put themselves and others in jeopardy. But once in a while, you have to wonder whether the kids haven't all blurred together. If suddenly, nobody sees a single kid or a single act. If every kid is a threat, the newest slide down the slope from authority to anarchy.

Is there any longer such a thing as simple adolescent bad judgment?

Do we still like kids? Do we still believe the best of them? Or do they scare us?

Kevin Prentice's misconduct told something about him. Now it's time to figure out what the response tells about us.

RAMSEY ARCHIVE

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.