DEKALB COUNTY -- Two seniors at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. High School will miss their baccalaureate -- but make their graduation -- after a stink that started over a cake knife.

Because of the school's zero tolerance policy on weapons, Ashley Pickens and Candace Grier, both honor students, were suspended from school for 10 days and told they would not be allowed to attend their baccalaureate ceremonies. The DeKalb school superintendent upheld that punishment but decided to allow the girls to walk with their classmates during graduation.

The trouble started when the girls brought a cake to school and looked for a knife to cut it. They say they found a butter-type knife in the school's band room and tried to return it, but the door had since been locked.

One of the girls put the knife in her book bag. Then a teacher saw it.

"He said it really didn't matter [that it was used for a cake]," Pickens said. "[He said] it's a knife on school grounds, and you have to be written up for it -- you ought to be glad we didn't have you arrested."

Both girls accepted the 10-day suspension, volunteering at a homeless shelter during that time, but they and their parents think this is a case of zero tolerance gone overboard.

"The knife was not brought to school," said Wendy Pickens, Ashley's mother. "The knife was in the band suite. When they finished washing the items, the band suite doors were closed. They couldn't return it."

"I'm disappointed," Ashley said. We came all this way to go through high school and life, and now we can't participate in anything we worked hard to do."

School officials claimed they enforced clearly written codes of conduct. Wednesday, a school tribunal will hear the girls' appeal to attend baccalaureate ceremonies.