After a 12 year-old girl was cuffed and led away from her junior high school for doodling on her desk last Monday, the school's principal is defending the police action, citing policy.

Alexa Gonzalez no longer faces a suspension for scribbling with a lime green marker, but principal Marilyn Grant told her mother, Moraima Camacho, that agency policy dictated that she calls the cops.

"[She said] that it wasn't their fault that it was something they had to do," Camacho said of her meeting with Grant at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills. "She doesn't consider it doodling."

As the always-colorful Mayor Bloomberg might say, boys are always going to dip girls ponytails into inkwells, but that doesn't mean we should arrest them for it. And indeed, the City says the cuffing was a mistake, but it raises the bigger question of training principals and teachers that they are educating children, who make mistakes.

As Joanna Molloy said in Saturday's Daily News, our kids are getting smarter, but our educators may be getting dumber.

I don't know what the qualifications are for landing a job as a teacher or principal, but one thing's for sure, it's not common sense.

What's next? Will spitballs bring an assault charge? Could kids get 7-to-10 for shooting rubber bands? With this kind of thinking, gramps would have done hard time for dunking girls' braids in the inkwells.

What a stunning lack of common sense! Alexa was initially suspended from school and told to do eight hours of community service.