A teacher being issued a summons for making a joke about having his students shot? It sounds outrageous.

It sounds absurd.

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A group of students and parents pray for victims of a school shooting Tuesday in Chardon, Ohio, that killed three people. Such tragedies cause schools to take any threat of violence seriously. The Associated Press

But this is apparently what happened in Freeport last month. It is also the kind of consequence that students face every day in schools that have adopted zero-tolerance policies on violence.

Verbal threats that used to be ignored, or at worst the cause of a forced apology, are now legal matters for students and their families.

Jokes that were taken the wrong way are now enough to force schools into lockdown or evacuation and lead to the expulsion of the perpetrator.

These are not times when jokes are taken lightly, and Freeport Middle School teacher David Mason, an educator with three decades of experience, should know that better than most people.

Adults in schools are expected to treat every hint of violence as the real thing when they hear it from their students.

So if Mason really said to his students (as one parent reports) that he “was so frustrated he wanted to take them to the roof and shoot them,” he should have known that somebody might take it the wrong way.

Under these policies, there is no such thing as an innocent error. A threat is a threat and it is treated seriously whether it was intended as a joke or not.

School violence is a real problem, as this week’s tragic school shooting in Chardon, Ohio, attests. Schools have a primary responsibility to keep students safe. Violence and threats of violence prevent students from learning. And bullying and teasing leave psychological scars that are as bad as the physical ones.

But if this incident proves to be nothing more than a poorly chosen remark taken out of context, maybe it will lead school officials to think about the students who have been caught in the same kind of arbitrary judgments and question whether these incidents really make their schools more safe.

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