An honor roll student at Silver Trail Middle School in Pembroke Pines, Florida shared part of her lunch with a classmate. The school suspended her for six days for violating the county’s “weapons policy” after she cut a peach in half with a child’s butter knife.

Ronald and Andrea Souto told Local 10 News reporter Michael Seiden that their 11-year-old daughter was suspended for six days for bringing the knife to school. “This is a set of a spoon, fork and knife for toddlers — one year old,” Andrea Souto said. “It is made for children to learn how to eat properly. She’s used it since she was baby.” According to the school district, the girl violated the county’s weapon policy when she used her butter knife in the cafeteria to cut the peach. “The friend asked for half of the peach and she cuts half of the peach and gives to her friend. She goes to the bathroom and comes back and the guy said, ‘Follow me,'” Ronald Souto said.

With every zero tolerance policy comes a 100 percent chance of people acting like complete idiots and blaming “the rules.”

A Broward County school district spokeswoman declined to offer specifics about the incident because of “student privacy,” but said, “The school followed district policy regarding this incident and continues to work with the student and parents involved. It is the district’s priority to maintain safe and secure campuses for students and staff at all times.” The Pembroke Pines Police Department said it has turned over their investigation to the State Attorney’s Office.

Seriously? Police and the State Attorney need to be involved because a good kid used a toddler’s eating utensil to cut a piece of fruit? The “knife” in question is probably less useful as a shiv than any number of school supplies. Cases like this are sadly becoming almost cliché in our paranoid school system.

Each one is a microcosm of the top-down authority loved by leftists. The person who is in the best position to make a decision is forbidden from doing so because someone several levels up has dictated that an innocent act requires a colossally stupid response. With other policies the idiocy sometimes becomes lost in complexity but it is still present whenever we elevate decisions outside of the sphere in which they should be made—bureaucrats in authority deciding things that should be decided between doctor and patient, employer and employee, teacher and student.

If the failure of centralized authority to make reasonable decisions isn’t obvious to people in situations like this, is there any hope of convincing people that local control is more effective?