[Dan Evans]

Don't want to hurt or embarrass a student.

Unless it's to handcuff them and haul them off to the cop station because they had a pair of scissors.

[dufekin]

When I was in school, students oftentimes had to change classes outdoors, whether going to, from, or between the dozens of portable classrooms that dotted the schoolyard or to make better time around the onerous (and sporadically violent) traffic jams in the narrow hallways. Trapped all day in a decaying building in which the torrential rains poured through the porous roof and long-lost windows and seeped through the second floor into the first, some enterprising students decided to keep at least partially dry by using umbrellas on relatively calm days.

This move drew the ire of the educrats on the school board, who decreed that bringing an umbrella to "school" was the "moral equivalent of detonating a thermonuclear bomb" and would be punished appropriately. Such punishment, levied inconsistently at best, usually consisted of having some school employee (never a teacher) taking the umbrella and using it for him/herself. I guess the poor educrats just wanted to stay dry when they had to go visit their schools and didn't want the burden of buying their own umbrellas.

I'm not sure what's happening there these days. It would be interesting to see.