I remain very skeptical of "zero tolerance" policies in school. For example, CNN has more about this 14 year old student in Atlanta who was expelled for writing a journal entry in which a fictional student dreams of killing a teacher.

Rachel Boim will no longer be attending Roswell High School, in a suburb north of Atlanta, because it would be too much for her to cope with, David Boim said.

The father did not say where Rachel will attend, saying his daughter needs to put this situation behind her and "just be a 14-year-old girl" and "live the life of a regular 14-year-old," Boim said.

Susan Hale, Fulton County Schools spokeswoman, said the school administration wishes her well and "wants what's best for the student" so she can have a fresh start.

Now, it should be noted that she was expelled under the school's "zero tolerance" policy. According to her parents, after a teacher confiscated the girl's journal (as she showed the journal to a friend), the girl was removed from class by an armed guard (not exactly a subtle tactic). Once she was expelled, the resulting media attention has been, in her father's words, "surreal." The girl says she was simply writing a work of fiction and did not intend to make a threat.

I remember quite vividly kids in school who would draw pictures of various teachers and show them being killed, maimed, or otherwise hurt. Riddled with arrows, eaten by animals, run over by a car, etc. Such images were, by and large, just an expression of the mixture of boredom and frustration so frequently exhibited by school age kids. There wasn't any real harm intended by them. Yet I assume that any such pictures would likewise get those kids expelled today. My son's little comic book portrayals of characters fighting and hurting each other are also probably beyond the pale.

I recognize that there isn't an issue of this girl being prosecuted for any crime, as there was in the Oklahoma case involving a high school student who wrote a "plan of attack" for a school assault. But I remain bothered by these policies, which I think do a few things, none of which I feel are particularly worthwhile: