I remember a few years ago when my little brother was still in high school. To graduate he had to take a speech class and so he did an informative speech on how to break down and clean a rifle. The rifle he brought in to demonstrate with was a Ruger Mini-14 with the factory folding stock. Now like I said this was a few years ago and it was also in a rural Oregon school, but oh how times have changed!
It doesn't seem all that long ago that dads, and moms too, would drive to school to pick up their kids in the family truck with a deer rifle right in the rifle rack in plain sight. Now days kids are getting expelled for drawing pictures of guns or bringing "weapons" to school like the chain on a Tweety keychain!
I too am a teacher (1st & 2nd grade) and I regularly wear a 4" Kershaw lockblade to school. The kids and parents know I carry it because I use the damn thing every day. I use it for opening boxes, unplugging glue bottles, sharpening colored pencils, removing staples, removing splinters, etc. Is it a knife, YES! Is it a weapon, NO! IT'S A TOOL!!! These "no tolerance" policies that schools are proudly announcing are absurd in the extreme. They are nothing more than knee-jerk fixes to relatively rare and issolated problems that are designed to give people that "warm & fuzzy" feeling.
A few years ago on the last day of school there was a cougar spotted in a neighborhood a few blocks away from our school. We were supposed to have our field-day outside with the kids, but were basically on "lockdown" all day in our classrooms. The state police and deputy sheriffs where patrolling the area looking for the cat, but what gave me and the other teachers here at school that "warm & fuzzy" feeling was the parent parked out in the parking lot with his hunting rifle.
If you ask me there are a lot of people out there that need to pull their head out of their ass and do a serious reality check!