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MONTREAL – Shawn Soucy is an honour-roll high-school student who had never even received a detention until the day last December when he says he absent-mindedly left a pocket knife in his backpack.

To Shawn, 16, the knife is a tool he uses when helping out on his family’s dairy farm south of Montreal. But to the school board, it was a potential weapon for which there is zero tolerance.

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For the last four months, Shawn and his parents have been fighting an expulsion that has forced him to spend his final semester of high school learning from tutors in isolation and missing out on class activities, including a grad trip to Europe that he had saved for.

“I just want to get back into school. That’s my main goal,” he said in an interview Sunday.

I just want to get back into school. That’s my main goal

“But if that doesn’t happen, the policy at least has to change. Zero tolerance doesn’t work any more. I don’t think it ever worked. It’s a paranoid policy used by paranoid people for no reason. It doesn’t trust people at all.”