A "pen" in the backside

Every now and then at school, there is a staff meeting scheduled, for staff to raise issues about anything they please. No one has yet had the guts to write "how did the head's affair with another member of staff start" or "is it really true that the governors' board has demanded both you and your lover are gone by September?". To be honest, the joke is a bit worn out now, apart for the other schools in the LEA, who apparently still find it hilarious. Anyway.
So instead, people try to hold off from writing anything on the agenda, so that we can all go home early (or more likely, write the 90 reports that are due next week). But not this time. Someone had to write "pupils' lack of equipment - what is the policy of the school". Unsurprisingly, it was a maths teacher.
So off we all go to the hall, where an extremely interesting discussion followed for about 45 minutes. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of other pointless meetings we attend, but I thought this one was particularly revealing in the kind of suggestions people made. Mr Rottweiller (the maths teacher who raised the issue) suggested that form tutors should check that pupils have a pen, pencil and their equipment at least once a week and give detentions to those who failed to pass the test. Unsurprisingly, staff were not impressed at having to babysit yet more kids at lunchtime. Then Swiss national (yours truly) suggested the school should sell pens like they do ties or planners (to be frank, I've started my own business, Tesco value ones! At the pace I'm selling them and with the profit I make on them, I'll be a millionaire in 100 years). The Head saluted it as a positive solution. Mr Rottweiller said it did not teach kids to be responsible, so it wasn't good. Then Mr Webmaster suggested that we should have a special page on our computerised registration system so that there is a record of who did not have a pen when, and then follow up with detentions, or send letters home etc.
As usual, no solution was found. We were nearly at each others' throats by the end of the meeting (more accurately, at Mr Rottweiller's throat for going on and on about it and insisting on the detentions instead of dropping it). So I guess in the meantime I will keep getting notes from him informing me that Ritalin Kid and other of my tutees did not have a pen, pencil or calculator in his lesson (read "you're a bad form tutor, you should control their organisation better) while I will keep recycling his notes (they're the perfect size for 10-question-tests) and making a 4.7p profit on each pen I sell to beef up my bank account. I think I'll go shopping now!