Overreaction Of The Day: Let’s Send A 6 Year Old Kid To Reform School!

OK, so this kid, who just so happens to be a freaking Cub Scout, gets busted for bringing a Swiss Army style knife to school. Fine - no knives in school. Sure. But then, on top of having it confiscated, they school turned around, called the boy's mother and told him that he's suspended and may have to undergo a 45 day program in reform school.

REFORM SCHOOL.

For bringing a utility knife with him to school, one that was given to him by the Cub Scouts, so that he could use it to eat his lunch with, just like he was taught to do when camping.

A Swiss Army-type combination of fork, spoon, bottle opener and knife, the tool has been Zachary’s favorite ever since he got it to take on Cub Scout camping expeditions. “He eats dinner with it, breakfast and everything else, so it never occurred to him that this would have been something wrong to do,” the 6-year-old’s mother, Debbie Christie, told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Tuesday from Newark, Del.

The totality of Zachary’s circumstances was that he had no idea that it was wrong to take his favorite camping tool to class. When the teacher asked for it when he got off the bus, he handed it over, unaware that he was already in serious trouble. He went to class while his principal called his mother.

“She said that I needed to come to the school immediately; that Zachary had brought a dangerous weapon into school, and I needed to come and pick him up. He would be suspended for five days pending a disciplinary action committee hearing. She said that he had a knife,” Christie told Vieira.

I understand taking the knife to school is probably a bad idea. But, for chrissake, the boy is 6 years old. Taking it away for the day and then sending it home with a note at the end of the day seems to me to be the rational response. But in today's Zero Tolerance world, I suppose that that sounds too much like coddling the kid, so sure, let's give him a minimum of 5 days suspension with the possibility of a month and a half or more of reform school.

The part hat baffles my mind the most about this sort of news is that the punishments are being dolled out by people who grew up in a world where kids carried knives like this one, hell, far more dangerous than this one, around all the time. It amazes me that people are so far out of touch with reality, that they can doll out punishments like this without blinking.

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