Agreed completely. The mom should be at the principal's office defending him with receipts from the ACLU, not agonizing about her kid being disrespectful. Disrespectful is bad, but the proper response to saying something insulting about the staff - not even to them directly I assume, unless the teacher who assigned the essay was included in the group? - is not suspension, it's probably something like detention!

That said, I find it interesting that in the good advice about actually talking about his ideas, it didn't occur to the columnist or apparently anyone else in the situation to look into what actually does reduce school violence. I guarantee this is a subject with a lot of scholarship on it, and so-called "zero tolerance" policies in various forms have been used across the US for decades, so if there's any evidence they work or that they are strongly counterproductive, surely that should be the focus of the conversation and not just like, "tell me about your feelings and brainstorm about harm reduction as a purely imaginary exercise".