The Supreme Court spent Wednesday morning remembering their dear old golden school days as they tried to focus on the merits of Falvo vs. Owasso Schools.

        I hope the justices wondered why something that should have been dealt with in a parent-teacher conference ended up in the Supreme Court.

        Kristja Falvo is a mother of three from Oklahoma. In 1997, her sixth-grade son, who had a learning disability that made him a slow reader, was embarrassed in class. His teacher routinely had students exchange and correct each other's papers. The teacher then had the students call out their classmates' scores, which she marked down in her grading book. Ms. Falvo's son was humiliated because classmates teased him about his poor grades.

        A reasonable solution would have been for Ms. Falvo to meet with the teacher and suggest a less public way to record grades. If the teacher was too obtuse to see the problem, the next reasonable step would be a conference with the principal. The focus should have been, “Hey, we have a child here having a problem. How can we fix that?”

        Instead, everybody made a federal case out of it — a big federal case.

        In 1998, Ms. Falvo sued Owasso Independent School District, claiming test-swapping violated a federal law that requires educational records be kept private. The trial judge ruled the 1974 Family Education and Privacy Act didn't cover such routine stuff as homework and daily quizzes. Ms. Falvo won an appeal by claiming paper swapping is a civil rights violation.

        So now the case is before the Supremes. Troops of lawyers have turned it into a battle between the sovereignty of local schools and the might of the federal government. Who cares about one little sixth grader?

        If the Supreme Court puts dunce caps on everybody and orders them to stay after school and wash chalkboards, I will stick a gold star on the justices' permanent records.

        Contact David Wells at dwells@enquirer.com.