The case could not be sadder: A high school student described as quiet and responsible by her friends died this week in a violent attack in a girls’ restroom at the Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington, Delaware.

“She didn’t believe in fighting,” said a friend of hers, USA Today reported. “The craziest thing is she died in a fight.”

At a Thursday night vigil for the deceased teen, Amy Inita Joyner-Francis, “community leaders spoke about the need for teens to develop a strong sense of self-worth to stem violence that occurs, often in troubled neighborhoods around Howard High,” said the USA Today report.

No weapons were involved, and the girl reportedly was involved in a fight involving two other students, a spokesperson said. “All these other girls started banking her — like, jumping her — and she hit her head on the sink,” said another student who was in the restroom at the time, according to Philadelphia TV station WPVI.

But kids of all backgrounds need far more than a strong self of self-worth. Schools are responsible for keeping children safe during school hours, period. Those same kids need strong guidance, direction, protection, and strong and loving parents and mentors who are there for them on a consistent and loving basis.

Incidents of school violence seem more frequent as parents in many areas of the country have fewer choices for their children’s education — and this is an issue for the states to resolve, not another opportunity for federal overreach. Yet that’s not what has happened in recent years.

“I’m going to torture you,” a Philadelphia school student taunted his teacher several years ago. “I’m doing this because I can’t be removed.” That threat wasn’t a teenage boast. The kid knew that President Obama’s limits on school discipline shielded him from expulsion or serious penalties.

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The Philadelphia teacher, Allen Zollman, described the student’s threat while testifying several years ago in front of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about the punishment policies.

The guidelines — formally issued in a joint letter from the Obama Departments of Justice and Education two years ago but implemented several years earlier — ensure that wild or dangerous students go unpunished once their racial group’s monthly quotas are reached, even as other students continue to be punished for identical offenses.

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“I’ve seen records vanish, and white kids suspended for offenses that black kids don’t even get written up for,” said Aaron Benner, a black fourth-grade teacher at John A. Johnson Achievement Plus Elementary School in St. Paul, Minnesota.

LZ-Infographic-OutofSchoolSuspensionThat federal intrusion into schools’ autonomy allows wild kids to seriously disrupt classrooms where millions of black, Hispanic, white and Asian kids are trying to educate themselves. Indeed, the Obama policy aimed at protecting minority children from unfair punishment may result in minority children being victimized disproportionately by bullying and violence.

The policy has deep-sixed effective punishments in many school districts around the country. Instead, disruptive and dangerous students are getting warm-and-fuzzy “restorative practices” that include discussing feelings and motivations during “circle time.”

School principals and officials expect to be sued by the feds if they try to use normal discipline tactics.

“You have to make certain that your school discipline cases match those [quota] percentages. If you don’t, you’ll have the feds on your doorstep,” said Joshua Dunn, a professor at the University of Colorado and director of the university’s Center for Legal Studies.

Anecdotal and statistical evidence suggests these guidelines are boosting violence, and are putting both teachers and students at risk. But for the administration, education and classrooms are all about politics, interest groups, racial quotas — and federal penalties for any school districts that fight back.

Anecdotal and statistical evidence suggests these new guidelines are boosting violence, and are putting both teachers and students at risk.

The Obama administration and its advocacy allies say quotas are needed to block the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.”

“A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a Jan. 8, 2014, statement in Baltimore.

The push formally began in July 2012, with a presidential executive order that established a government panel to ensure school discipline is evenly distributed. Obama claims the power to regulate school discipline because of popular laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex or national origin.

According to Obama, those laws are violated if punishments given to students are not level across the various ethnic and racial groups. So if only 2 percent of Asian kids are appropriately punished in a year, while 6 percent of Hispanics are appropriately punished, the schools should be punished for discriminating against Hispanics, according to Obama and his deputies.

“I was terrified and bullied by a fourth-grade student,” a teacher at a Los Angeles Unified School District school recently commented.

This aggressive legal strategy is called “disparate impact,” and it is being used by Obama and his progressive allies to grab control of school’s discipline rules. They’re also using the strategy to grab control of states’ and cities’ housing policies, hiring practices for firemen and policemen, and enforcement of drug laws.

Obama has plenty of backersIn June 2014, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the city’s school district was “moving away from a zero-tolerance policy and promoting restorative practices” as part of a so-called “Suspension and Expulsion Reduction Plan.”

But a teacher in Chicago described the situation at her school to the Chicago Tribune last year as “totally lawless.” To deter bad behavior, “you have to have consequences,” said John Engels, a fifth-grade teacher in Chicago.

In Philadelphia, Zollman said minority students break rules and dare the teachers to remove them from class.

In Santa Ana, California, middle-school students are smoking marijuana in the restrooms, attacking staff and spitting on teachers. Some students also are threatening to stab teachers, according to the Orange County Register. In 2013, 36 teachers and other employees sued the school system because they said their classrooms have become hostile work environments.

“It’s a lot like ‘Lord of the Flies,'” teacher John McGuinness told the Orange County Register, referring to the dystopian novel by William Golding. “They’ve allowed the rough element to take over and run the place.”

“I was terrified and bullied by a fourth-grade student,” a teacher at a Los Angeles Unified School District school commented on the Los Angeles Times website not long ago. “The black student told me to ‘Back off, b—h.’ I told him to go to the office and he said, ‘No, b—h, and no one can make me.”

“Discipline has been more lax .. It is insane now,” one retired teacher in Santa Monica, California, told LifeZette. “When we go to a principal [to ask for help], they say there’s nothing we can do.” She said they fear the impact of parental and federal lawsuits on their careers.

Data from the Department of Education shows that even as violence rates outside of school fell, the rates of violence within schools, where the Obama policy holds sway, continued climbing in 2013.

Violent school clashes have grown faster than less-violent school disruptions. Since August of 2014, deadly threats have almost tripled in schools across the nation, according to a survey by a school security firm.

“We reviewed 812 school threats across the country … threats are up 158 percent since last year,” according to the firm National School Safety and Security Services.

Even some of Obama’s usual allies have pushed back against his progressive policies.

Several labor unions, normally in stride with the administration and their city mayors, have expressed reservations about the new policies. The Chicago Teachers Union complained the city’s revised student-discipline code has left teachers struggling to control wild kids.

In New York, Syracuse Teachers Association President Kevin Ahern said in a letter to the Syracuse Post Standard that the new rules have created a “systemic inability to administer and enforce consistent consequences for violent and highly disruptive student behaviors” that “put students and staff at risk and make quality instruction impossible.”

Legal and science experts say Obama’s disparate impact strategy is bad law and bad science.

“Disparate impact is fundamentally flawed in all policy areas,” Roger Clegg, CEO of the Center for Equal Opportunity, told LifeZette.

“Disparate impact is fundamentally flawed in all policy areas,” Roger Clegg, CEO of the think tank Center for Equal Opportunity, told LifeZette. “It in fact undermines the original ideas of the civil rights movement, and now turns to race to make policy, instead of the opposite, which was the original intention of the whole movement.”

This isn’t just a dispute about policy preferences, but about what the Constitution and civil rights laws actually mean. The Obama team’s disparate-impact theories continue to be tested in courts.

In schools, despite the Obama team’s theory that punishments unfairly target minority groups, data shows the punishments meted out in schools are an accurate match for average behavior by people in various groups. For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black students are 60 percent more likely than whites, and more than twice as likely as Asians, to fight on school grounds.

The New York-based Manhattan Institute reported last year that black teenagers in Chicago are 25 times as likely as white teens to get arrested, and 10 times more likely to be convicted of murder than are white teens.

This also means, logically, that black students are more likely to be victimized by violence.

This article, originally published in July 2015 in LifeZette, has been updated with the latest incidence of school violence in the U.S.