Nuts.

It's good to know that the public school bureaucrats in Walnut Creek have matters well in hand:

At the center of the storm is a 5-year-old boy enrolled at Valle Verde Elementary School in Walnut Creek. He suffers from "peanut and tree nut" allergies that his mother says are life-threatening.

As a result, school officials have taken extraordinary steps in Pod C, a group of kindergarten classrooms at Valle Verde that share a common central area.

The parents of other kindergarten students were informed of the situation in a letter from school officials, who decreed that "all kindergarten students will begin the day by washing hands with soap and water . . . supervised by classroom staff."

Then they learned that a licensed vocational nurse has been hired to monitor the student. On the first day of school, parents said, their kids' backpacks and lunch boxes were searched for peanut butter sandwiches and such.

Apparently, the denizens of Walnut Creek still haven't quite grasped the fact that the experts know best (nor do they seem conscious of the irony inherent in the decision by the parents of the alleged sufferer of nut-oil allergies to alight in a town named after one of the deadly fruits):

"Look," says Kathryn Stewart, a clinical psychologist who works with special education high school students, "my son (now 15) is allergic to peanuts and an alumni of Valle Verde. This kind of nonsense makes me crazy.

"By kindergarten, and certainly by first grade, my son was able to say, 'What is in that?' " she said. "Searching a lunch box is insane. This goes to personal responsibility not changing the rest of the world to fit you."

At the very least, we ought to be grateful that the tots in question are getting an object-lesson in the supreme importance of adhering to the rules promulgated by agents of the state, no matter how trivial they may seem in the scheme of things.

We must catch them while they're young, before it's too late.