Is fighting back when you are assaulted a family thing?

Schools simply DO NOT take bullying seriously. Does my son deserve to be expelled because your son decided to physically bully my child, and my son punched him a couple of times for it?

My position as the adult is "Fighting is not a good thing. You can get seriously hurt. You're going to get punished for it regardless of whether you deserve it. So there had best be physical damage at stake before you start fighting. Words and name calling are insufficient."

However, zero tolerance policies are stupid. I would have been expelled on them as a child.

I was an honor student and "geek" so the "undesirables" thought they had carte blanche to pick on the "geek" group--including me (Schools do nothing about bullying, remember?) Even though I was over 6 foot and lettered in sports, I was the "brain".

About once a year, one of the idiots would take my walking away as cowardice, corner me and would actually physically assault me, and that would be my signal that it was time to clean his clock to stay safe. And I would have an in-school detention for three days (which was annoying as I had homework for three days and the dipshit just slept).

This is a reasonable response as long as nobody got seriously injured. As the geek, it's annoying, but you don't want to incentivize fighting even when it's justified. And you certainly don't want to incentivize taking the fight to real, permanent damage.

HOWEVER, the school allowing the situation to reach that point is the failure. It's not like the school didn't know who the troublemakers were and what they were doing. When you have teachers quietly thanking a student for assaulting another student, there's a systemic problem with the school administration--not the children.

In my experience, almost nothing saves you from that. Yes, there are exceptions, but that's why we call them exceptions.