Why is it that high school administrators somewhere have to go and make all other high schools look bad?

Administrators at Riverhead High School on Long Island in New York suspended four students for mimicking Tim Tebow’s famous pose in the hallways. The administrators called it a “hallway hazard” and called it “disruptive.”

And they have made the national news for their actions.

It’s our guess that high schools that fail to teach the First Amendment to their administrators are the ones that usually do a really good job of quashing student expression. Why is it so often that high schools in many places teach students to not express themselves and then colleges reverse the situation and tell students to go ahead and express themselves?

It’s like the administrators at Riverhead High School were itching to fit a stereotype.

The students at Riverhead were given no warning, just immediate one-day suspensions, merely for striking a pose that has been a national fad made famous by the quarterback of the Denver Broncos. Kids are going to enjoy fads. It’s part of being a kid.

Photos show there was plenty of space near the students, and the four teenage boys didn’t appear to be fire hazard, as the administrators claim. Two administrators chatting in a doorway at a school board meeting create more of a fire hazard than these four boys.

The term “disruptive” gets used capriciously in some schools. It’s OK for any behavior that shows school spirit or American pride to be disruptive but for religious, political or artsy views it’s not. If a cheerleader wears extra makeup and a temporary tattoo of the school logo on her cheek, that’s OK. If a goth girl wears goth-type makeup, it’s “disruptive.” It happens over and over again in schools across the nation.

It’s often as though school administrators have forgotten the landmark Supreme Court ruling Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent School District. Students have free-speech rights.

All that said, many schools do get it right. Many school administrators do understand students have First Amendment rights.

But administrators somewhere once again are going to make all schools look bad.