Poor Zach...

It seems like kids these days just can't get a break. Like this poor little guy from Delaware. He was so excited about joining the cub scouts that he brought his little combination eating utensil to school to show his friends. His teachers saw it and were so impressed that they decided to send his ass to reform school for 45 days. No one got hurt. No one even got threatened. Nope, he just wanted to show off his cool little gizmo, and now he's in trouble. They even went so far as to have a hearing in front of the school board about this; no joke, his karate instructor and his mother's fiance were his character references.

The logic at work here is completely ridiculous. Apparently, this thing is a combo spoon/fork/knife. Because it has a knife attachment, it was considered a weapon, which is why little Zach is in trouble. The problem is that even if you take away all the actual weapons, there are still plenty of things you can hurt someone with in a school environment. You could cause serious damage to someone's face with a pen or pencil. If you were determined enough, you could probably choke someone to death with an electrical cord. Hell, one good push off the monkey bars could cause serious neck/spinal damage if you landed wrong. My point is this: you can take away the weapons, but you'll never make things completely safe. It's the intent that's the important part. If one kid really wants to hurt one of his classmates, he'll find a way.

Now I'm not saying that we should let kids carry weapons into school either. We don't need gun racks next to the coat racks. But the more you treat schools like prisons, the more the kids are going to act like inmates. You have to treat them with some level of respect, and understand that the vast majority of our children aren't out to hurt one another. Supervise them, of course, but they don't need to be under the camera eye every minute of the day.

I would also say that having police checkpoints at the entrances to our schools doesn't make kids feel safer. I know I don't usually feel safe when I have to go through one of those things. Instead, it makes me feel like I'm in a place where it's more likely I'll get hurt. I would want my kid to feel like school is a safe place, like nothing bad's going to happen there. How can you possibly feel comfortable in an environment where you're constantly being searched, where dogs go through and sniff all the lockers, where you can't even take your backpack to class with you? You can't, and this is going to have a negative effect on your schoolwork, your ability to socialize, etc.

There are so many things wrong with our school system that I can't possibly get into them all here. But this one I think is pretty important. Little Zachary didn't do anything wrong, and he certainly does not deserve to be punished for this. I know nobody wants another Columbine, but at some point the paranoia has to be checked. At some point, someone has to say, "This is ridiculous." And it needs to be the educators saying this, not the parents, not the newspapers. If they can't understand the consequences of their choices, then they have no business educating our children in the first place.