Many schools are devoid of principles.
Most schools are good places that teach students as they are supposed to and that is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
My point (and you could probably see that if you read the article) is that there was a jump from classroom discipline to handing over to the school police officer, an hour in juvie waiting around, and then suspension for the rest of the year. We're talking about burping and he probably did do it to be disruptive, but even so the school discipline and even consequences outside schools and by police have changed quite a bit over the last couple of decades. A minor thing can end up turning into someone dead in the case of police and in school, we get these kinds of things.
In the case of schools...after 9/11 and school shootings, we've embedded police in the schools and rely on them too much to be part of discipline, calling on them too soon, too often. If you ask a police officer to remove a 7th grader from a classroom because the kid is autistic or has some behavior disorder that is very disruptive, the police officer may end up committing violence against the kid as we've seen in threads in this forum. Now, what is appropriate to the level of burping many times in class? It certainly isn't as bad as a fist fight between two students which might result in a three day suspension. If a student has burped disruptively for 5 minutes or so, that may deserve a detention and writing 100 times I will not burp in class. A warning, if it's that and then continuing out in the hall, then it's go to the principal's office. The principal might give more detentions or in-school suspension for rest of day. This is an example of how the level of the consequences ought to escalate with the level of the offense, not necessarily that they are right on target.
