Taylor Hess joined an ever-expanding list of students whose educations have been disrupted by their school districts’ hide-bound adherence to zero tolerance policies.

Hess, a 16-year-old honor student at a Dallas-Fort Worth area high school with a spotless disciplinary record, was expelled for a year after a bread knife was found earlier this month in the bed of his pickup.

Hess had been hauling his grandmother’s unwanted possessions to Goodwill and, unbeknownst to him, a knife fell out of a box. A security guard saw it the next day when the truck was parked in the school lot and from that point on, sanity temporarily left the building.

Fortunately for Hess, officials in the school district area were not deaf to the cries of outrage that enveloped them after the story hit the media. At a hearing, Hess’ one-year expulsion was reduced to five days and he was back in the classroom the next day.

This is what happens when lawmakers and policy-makers write rules in knee-jerk response to events. You get bad policy. And there’s a bunch of it on the books in America as a result of overreactions to the school shootings that grabbed headlines a few years ago.

Students have been disciplined for shooting paper clips across a cafeteria, pretending a chicken nugget was a gun and saying, “Pow, pow, pow,” and bringing a plastic knife in a lunch sack. What are they going to do, hijack the cafeteria?

A Virginia high school student, who was commended by his school district for taking a knife away from a suicidal friend, was then suspended for putting the knife in his locker instead of in the principal’s office. He missed 20 weeks of school.

An Ohio third-grader was suspended for two days after he wrote “You will die an honorable death” as part of a class assignment to come up with fortune cookie blurbs.

One hears moaning these days about how young people don’t respect their elders or authority figures. How much respect do lawmakers and administrators merit if they don’t appear capable of making the distinction between a knife meant to spread cheese on someone’s crackers and a switchblade?

So why the proliferation of these policies in recent years? Safety, you say? Phooey. Schools are still the safest places in America. Nope, these one-size-fits-all policies are a school district’s most effective shield against lawsuits. Do you realize what fresh hell could result if officials actually invested time and energy into making case by case assessments? Banish THAT thought.

The 6th U.S. Court of Appeals is sounding a voice of reason amid the cacophony of hysteria.

In its decision in Dusty Seal vs. Knox County Board of Education a case with almost identical circumstances to Hess’ the justices wrote, “(W)e cannot accept the board’s argument that because safety is important, and because it is often difficult to determine a student’s state of mind, that it need not make any attempt to ascertain whether a student accused of carrying a weapon knew that he was in possession of the weapon before expelling him.

“We are also not impressed by the board’s argument that if it did not apply its zero tolerance policy ruthlessly, and without regard for whether students accused of possessing a forbidden object knowingly possessed the object, this would send an inconsistent message to its students. Consistency is not a substitute for rationality.”

The judges know their Emerson a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

As the court said, no one argues a school board’s duty to ensure safety on its campuses or its right to dole out appropriate discipline for serious rule violations. But the operative word here is “appropriate.”

As long as school districts continue to hide behind these ill-crafted policies, folks with bigger minds and an appreciation for proportionate response will have to fight them. That isn’t easy since most of the attorneys familiar with educational statutes that guide such foolishness work for school districts and have little interest in soiling their mess kits.

But fight they must. The fact that officials in the Texas school district agreed to revisit the expulsion policy is a sign that everyone is educable.

Jill “J.R.” Labbe is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.