Outrage of the Week

We regularly report on outrageous cases involving over-zealous school officials enforcing one-size-fits-all, zero-common sense, "zero-tolerance" rules.

Well, here we go again.  This latest outrage involves a seven-year-old Baltimore, Md. student who, according to a recent Daily Caller article, was suspended for two days for the horrendous act of shaping a breakfast pastry into what his teacher thought looked like a gun. 

According to the young student, he was eating a strawberry breakfast pastry during snack time and was biting off pieces in an attempt to shape it into a mountain.  Apparently, the teacher thought the student's handiwork instead looked like a gun, and promptly escorted him to the principal's office. 

What's next, arresting a kid because he pulled an "assault banana" out of his lunchbox? 

Also outrageous is the case of a Florida high school student who was recently suspended for disarming a student who had a loaded gun.

According to another Daily Caller article, the 16-year-old student was riding the bus home when he and other witnesses say a fight broke out among two other students.  One of the students involved in the fight then pulled a loaded gun on the other student and allegedly claimed he was going to shoot that student.

The 16-year-old and others eventually confronted the student gunman and disarmed him.  Law enforcement officials later confirmed that the firearm was loaded.

The next day, the 16-year-old was given a three-day suspension for taking part in what the school called an “incident.”

According to the article, the unnamed 16-year-old student said he’s certain his actions prevented a murder:  “I think he was really going to shoot him right then and there.  He was going to shoot him point blank.”

The 16-year-old’s mother--also unnamed--said school officials told her that her son was suspended because he was too scared to cooperate in the subsequent investigation.

What we have here are two very different cases, with two similarly ridiculous outcomes.

We all can agree that we want our children to be safe at school, and that reasonable safety measures should be followed.  But what about a well-reasoned response?  When school administrators allow "zero-tolerance" to become "zero-common sense," we've gone beyond unreasonable and arrived at outrageous.