10 year old girl arrested for cutting food

I am not joking. Good Lord, what is wrong with some people?

An elementary student in Marion County was arrested Thursday after school officials found her cutting food during lunch with a knife that she brought from home, police said.

The 10-year-old girl, a student at Sunrise Elementary School in Ocala, was charged possession of a weapon on school property, which is a felony.

According to authorities, school employees spotted the girl cutting her food while she was eating lunch and took the steak knife from her.

The girl told sheriff's deputies that she had brought the knife to school on more than one occasion in the past.

Students told officials that the girl did not threaten anyone with the knife.

The girl was arrested and transported to the Juvenile Assessment Center.

If you have a zero-tolerance policy, and all students have been made aware of it, then I can understand suspending this girl, even though I would still see it as a gross overreaction. But to call the police??

Don't police have anything better to do than arrest 10 year old kids for using a kitchen utensil the way it was intended to be used?

Fine, let's play that game. If I were the parents of this girl, I would insist that the school call the police for every violation of the law on school grounds. To do anything less would be discrimination. Schoolyard fighting = Assault & Battery. Unwanted touching = Sexual harassment/Sexual assault. Swiping someone's pencil = Theft of Private Property. Of course, it's not entirely a joke. It really does happen sometimes.

If they had decided to do this in my day, I would have gone to jail at least one hundred times. So would every student I knew. What ever happened to schools handling this kind of thing themselves? Then again, once upon a time, teachers were allowed to actually discipline students without getting sued (such as here). Go even farther back, and they were allowed to use canes on the student's backsides. OK - maybe that's too far back. Why don't we just split the difference and set the clock back halfway and leave it at that? Not all progress is good progress, and sometimes our parents and teachers of the previous generation knew what they were doing.

Some more comments on this story can be found here.





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