The cost to provide security for this week's papal visit has been pegged at $12 million.  There are some who say the government went overboard with security and the related mega-cost, but there are many who say it is needed since terrorism became a security issue inside the United States.

        Last week 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a Texas high-school freshman, brought to school a beeping, strange-looking homemade concealed device that turned out to be a clock.  It was in a small case, filled with wires, a digital read-out and other gadgets.  He wanted to show his teacher what he had built.

        School officials thought it looked like a bomb and called police, who put him in handcuffs.  He was released after all was confirmed, but he was suspended from school for three days for bringing the "suspicious" device to school.

        Ahmed is a Muslim and the screams of "Islamophobia" were quick to hit social media.  So loud were the criticisms that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg invited Ahmed to stop by Facebook headquarters.  Ahmed was given an invitation to be an intern at Twitter.  Hillary Clinton tweeted a message of support to Ahmed and President Obama invited him to the White House.

        But reacting to suspicious incidents in schools isn't confined to one Muslim student in Texas.  The others just don't get the publicity that this incident did.

        Among the host of others there was Josh Welch, a Maryland boy with ADHD who was 7 years old when he was kicked out of school for chewing a Pop-Tart® into the shape of a pistol and pretending to shoot other students with it.  His parents had to hire a lawyer and spent a year and a half trying to get the suspension erased from his record.

        Then there was Alex Stone, a 16-year-old boy from Summerville, SC who wrote a short story in which he imagined using a gun to kill a dinosaur.  For that, Stone had his locker searched and he was arrested, handcuffed, charged with "disorderly conduct" and suspended from school for three days.

        In Tennessee, Kendra Turner reported that she was suspended for saying "Bless you" after a student sneezed, and that her teacher told her that she would have no "godly speaking in class."  A school administrator reportedly said, "This was not a religious issue at all, but more of an issue the teacher felt was a distraction in her class."  What the administrator failed to add was that "bless you" was on a list of expressions banned in the classroom.

        Or how about Tawana Dawson, a 15-year-old student in Florida who was expelled for bringing a small nail clipper to class.  She was an academically strong student who had no record of disciplinary action.

        This is just a sampling of incidents that happen all across our country; a result of a zero tolerance, one-size-fits-all disciplinary procedure that mandates blanket punishment with no regard for individual circumstances.  It is a school rules issue, not Islamophobia.  You just don't hear about them because, well, these other cases just don't fit anybody's political or religious agenda.

        By the way, for all of the other students caught up in the rules issue who were vindicated – where are their invitations to the White House?