Common Sense......A Thing of the Past?

I received a call from Taylor yesterday about noon. Mom he says I'm in the office- why I ask. I got in a fight, Oh great here we go again. I tell him I will be right there. I arrive at the school to find him still waiting in the office. The principal calls us into the office, she looks puzzled as to why he would not talk to her alone. That's another story. (Most of you know about last year and how rotten it was.) Anyway Taylor tells his side of the story, I know there are two sides to every story, however the other kid was asked who else was there, if you had to pick out of 15 other kids which were all playing football, who would you pick? Needless to say, some one tackled break Brock, I tried to break them up, next thing I know Brock is chasing after me, he tackled me to the ground and wouldn't let go, so I punched him in the stomach. That's how I ended up here. To me it says not really a huge deal. Tell the boys to quit, maybe end the game, and move on. Instead, they get hauled into the office, where they each tell their side, In the mean time as Taylor is waiting for me he is getting baited, I guess in an effort to get him to change his story. It went something like this.
Principal-"So you tackled Brock?"
Taylor-"No"
Principal-"Well that's not what Brock said."
Taylor-(He can sense what is happening, it's not his first time) "No, I did not tackle Brock he tackled me"
She asks again, this is when he freezes, refusing to talk.
He does get a chance to talk, she says I talked to Brock, he said these other kids probably saw. One said Brock started it, one said Taylor started it, so now we have 4 different stories. So she decides they each get a discipline referral and they will miss recesses today that to me is not really to bad of a punishment. He will take it and manage. She also banned football for the whole 5th grade.

Here's my issues--I ask questions to the principal about why no one seems to want to find out the truth, I am told that she doesn't have the time to find out nor do they have enough duty teachers to find out who started it ect. She states that usually the duty teacher only see's part of the incident. I can see this, but come on when there are 20 kids involved, how can you pinpoint 2 to discipline? So then I ask "since you are banning football due to this "fight" are the other boys going to take it out on these two?" She replies "no I don't think so" of course. As soon as I return to pick up Taylor, I hear Taylor was being bad today, now we can't play football anymore. I am saddened by this I just hope he can deal with it better than I can. I guess we will see what today brings.

I remember when we were in school, these kinds of things were usually easily resolved. People were given the chance to talk and if it took some investigating, that's what they did. Now it seems like they take the easy way out. It is so frustrating. If some of these people had some common sense, things could be resolved right on the playground. Maybe these administrators need to go back to preschool and take lessons on being fair to everyone.