Did anyone think it would come to this? A child fashions what he calls a mountain out of a sandwich and because it resembles a gun the child gets suspended from school? Children, using their fingers to form a gun and shouting bang bang, suspended from school. Someone told they cannot wear an army hat to school because it is suggestive of the military?

How do these school officials intend to sanitize children from weapons? Everyday on the news there are reports of shootings. Movies have people using guns as if everyone carries. Have the school boards gone bonkers? Do they intend to remove every single reference to a firearm from the school. Will your child at some point, having committed an infraction, come home with his/her hands removed?

The zero tolerance policy was not meant to be used to eliminate just the suggestion of a gun, or a gun imitated in play by children. It was meant to eliminate the presence of an actual weapon for any reason on school property. The imagination can be used to convert anything into the shape of a weapon.

There has even been the suspension of a child for carrying a nail clipper. What next? Those pencils can be very sharp. Let’s eliminate pencils, pens, and rulers from the schools. A piece of chalk can be held and pointed as an imaginary gun… it must go.

Keeping a child safe is important, I agree. However, unless you wrap him/her in cellophane and wheel him/her into school on a hand truck, there is always the potential of an accident of some type occurring. You can’t protect them from everything. You certainly cannot insulate children from the daily news.

This zero tolerance policy meant well, but it has been interpreted by ignorance into a veritable nightmare. As they have interpreted it there are no gray areas. No lenience permitted for the behavior of a child. If it looks like a gun, it’s a gun, whether it’s made of bread and peanut butter or not.

Now there is talk of armed guards in the schools. Armed? With what? There is zero tolerance being enforced in the schools. Maybe they will be carrying pillows around to gently beat the children into compliance. If you bring a gun into a school there is always a chance of it being misused. If the school board can be ridiculous, so can I.

No student should be suspended for play acting unless it disrupts the normal functioning of the school.