From This Is True:

ZERO TOLERANCE, THE FRENCH WAY: A police officer in Ustaritz, France, was summoned to an elementary school’s cafeteria to remove a 5-year-old girl only identified as “Lea” as classmates watched. Lea’s crime? Her parents had not paid 160 Euros (US$220) in accumulated lunch fees. French officials were outraged when the report hit the news. “All children in France should be eating in their cafeteria, and not be victims of acts which, of this nature, are acts of violence,” fumed French Education Minister Vincent Peillon, who said he was “shocked” that the police were called. France’s human rights organization has started an investigation “to identify the successive dysfunctions that led to this situation,” says its director, Dominique Baudis. The police officer did as she was told: she removed the girl from the lunchroom, and took her home. When she found no one there, she took her to the police station — for lunch — and then took her back to school. (RC/Time) …See? It’s just that easy.

ZERO TOLERANCE, THE AMERICAN WAY: Melody Valentin, a fifth-grader in South Philadelphia, Pa., found an L-shaped piece of paper in her backpack in class; her grandfather had made it. As she went to throw it away, a classmate saw it and told the teacher Melody had a gun. “He yelled at me and said I shouldn’t have brought the gun to school,” Melody said through tears. “I kept telling him it was a paper gun but he wouldn’t listen.” As other students watched, administrators searched the girl and questioned her. Other children started to call her a “murderer,” and her mother had to pull her out of school to stop the bullying. The mother notes that the girl is having nightmares over the incident, and school officials refuse to comment. (RC/WTXF Philadelphia)

Slight correction: the school officials are the nightmare, and the silence is their defense.

Zero Tolerance in American school systems is nothing more than Zero Common Sense, driven by soulless attorneys hungry for billable hours and racked with paranoia.

Don’t put up with things you can’t change; change the things you can’t put up with.

The Old Wolf has spoken.