Zachary Christie's second chance

last updated 8 January 2015

Maybe you can't fight city hall, said Doug Stanglin in USA Today, but the parents of Zachary Christie, 6, won a battle with a Delaware school board. Zachary was facing 45 days in reform school because administrators said he violated a zero-tolerance weapons policy by bringing a camping utensil—a combo knife, spoon, fork—to class to eat his pudding at lunch. But the school board, faced with a "firestorm" of protests, changed the policy on Tuesday and said Zachary could return to first grade.

The school board still intends to punish kindergartners and first-graders who bring weapons to school, said the blog Moonbattery, with three- to five-day suspensions. Even that is "far beyond the crime, if you can call it a crime," but at least this is a step in the right direction. Let's hope school officials across the nation heard the outcry, and realize "America is absolutely sick of liberal elite statists trying to control our lives at every level."

Come now, "nobody thinks weapons should be allowed in schools," said Kurt Greenbaum in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "The punishment for that should be harsh." The problem in Zachary Christie's case was that he made the kind of mistake a 6-year-old kid makes—his mom didn't know her overeager Cub Scout planned to take his camping utensil to school—and the zero-tolerance policy heaped an excessive punishment on him. The lesson here is that school officials should always have the courage to admit when they are wrong.