I'm hardly the perfect parent, but had one of my kids been suspended for the same thing, I'd be checking their backpacks every time they were leaving the house.
About 55 years ago, my parents gave me a beautiful Buck knife, which I kept in a scabbard attached to my belt. Took it to school almost every day, as did 20+ fellow students. Of course, nothing ever happened.
The problem isn't the knife. It's the feral hoodlum, brought up wrong and trained to do worse, that's the problem.
Of course, nothing ever happened.
Because we aren't feral hoodlums.
Yep. I had a Case folding knife in my pocket most of the time.
Any kid that had previously been suspended for carrying a knife, and was intent on still carrying a knife, knowing that his parent would be checking his backpack before he left the house, would have hid it somewhere outside the home, or handed it over to one of their friends to hold, until he could retrieve it again, then hide it once more before going home. That's how convicts do it in the prison. The last thing they want to do is be caught carrying a weapon, so they usually stash them in a spot inside the prison, where they know they are going to be spending most of their time, then stash it again before heading back to the cell block or building at the end of the day.
Many years ago we even took our hunting rifles to school with us; nothing ever happened then either.