Trade Dunce Cap For Thinking Hat

What in the heck have the nation’s public school administrators done with their common sense?

Last month, a 6-year-old North Carolina boy kissed a female classmate and got suspended for sexual harassment.

Days later, a 7-year-old New York boy also was suspended, for the very same reason.

Then a 14-year-old girl in Ohio was suspended for four months after she gave one Midol tablet to a classmate in her middle school.

This week, a 13-year-old honor student in Humble, Texas, was suspended after a drug-sniffing dog found a bottle of Advil in her backpack. She had forgotten the pills there the night before, when she spent the night at a friend’s house and had needed Advil for a headache.

Now come the lawsuits. The 6-year-old’s mother has threatened legal action. She wasn’t satisfied with needed changes - already made! - in the school’s stupid policies.

Escalating litigiousness isn’t the solution, it’s part of the problem. We have forgotten how to rebuke, and then set aside, a simple error in judgment. Instead we have hamstrung schools with paralyzing webs of mindless rules, militant gender-equity committees, paranoid school-district lawyers and bureaucratic paperwork requirements.

Sure it’s a problem, and not a new one, for little boys to pester little girls on the playground. When boys and girls get older, the pestering does become serious. It’s also important to keep medicine out of the hands of children who might use it incorrectly.

But punishment ought to fit the crime, and in each of these instances a firm chat with the principal should have sufficed.

Our society needs to recover its perspective. There are some real problems in schools. While administrators terrorize sweet 6-year-old kissers, adolescents with menstrual cramps and teachers who leave Bibles on their desks, classrooms are being disrupted, day in and day out, by brats and thugs whom educators are afraid to expel. Drunkenness, narcotics, tobacco and impudence really do harm kids and education. The persistence of these woes testifies to a lack of the nerve required to deal with them decisively.

If legal and regulatory firepower should go anywhere, it should be directed against conduct that disrupts classrooms or places kids in serious danger.

Americans are smart enough to end this nonsense - if only we can trust principals and teachers enough to rely on their old-fashioned common sense, rather than the lawyers and regulations and paperwork that our collective insecurities have heaped upon the schools. But trust has to be earned, and that’s the problem, isn’t it?

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board