Krell figured CPS had done research on the longer school day because, like every parent in the system, he'd received a letter from Jean-Claude Brizard, then the CEO, claiming that "our elementary school students are receiving 22 percent less instruction time than their peers across the country." So he sent CPS a FOIA request asking for "the reports, statistics, comprehensive city-by-city analysis and other documents that back up the statement by Mr. Brizard."

CPS responded that "the district does not maintain any documents responsive to your request."

He knew CPS had lots of information on this matter because he'd read about it in the Tribune. In that article, CPS officials boasted about how they'd left no stone unturned in their effort to make the selection process as fair and objective as possible. They said the process considers data such as home-ownership rates in the students' census tracts and the share of homes where English isn't the primary language.

"We have rainbow-colored lockers, and it's our field of dreams... and then to watch the video game, and see people shooting up our field of dreams, it was just so disturbing," Alex Devlin, a teacher at Port Moody Secondary School, told CBC News. "I believe it's just a game, it's not reality... but a lot of kids don't live in reality, right," another local said.

The map was this because it's architecture and design is rather ideal for the game's tactics. Furthermore, this is a location we are quite familiar with already. Additionally, supporters and fellow alumni are also likely familiar with this location, which makes it an ideal common ground for this game and its intended audience.

Although the creation of such a video game is likely ill-conceived in the current climate, it does not constitute an offence. Investigators from the Port Moody Police Department have interviewed the developer of this game and have concluded that he does not pose a danger to the staff or students of Port Moody Secondary.

A 7-year-old Anne Arundel County boy was suspended for two days for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and saying, “Bang, bang”— an offense the school described as a threat to other students, according to his family.

The pastry “gun” was a rectangular strawberry-filled bar, akin to a Pop-Tart, that the second-grader had tried to nibble into the shape of a mountain Friday morning, but then found it looked more like a gun, said his father, William “B.J.” Welch.

- Feb. 5, 2013 - A ten-year-old Virginia student was suspended for bringing an orange-tipped toy gun on a bus.

- Feb. 1, 2013 - A 9-year-old student was suspended for bringing a 2-inch toy gun on a key fob to school.

- Jan. 29, 2013 - A 5-year-old student could be suspended for crafting a Lego gun during an after-school program. Not only that, but he'd crafted his fingers into a gun mere weeks earlier.

- Jan. 22, 2013 - A 5-year-old is suspended for discussing her Hello Kitty bubble gun, saying, "I'll shoot you, you'll shoot me and we'll all play together."

- Jan. 2, 2013 - A 6-year-old in a Washington D.C. school was suspended for making a gun gesture with his hands.

- August 28, 2012 - A deaf 3-year-old preschooler is asked to change the sign he uses for his name -- Hunter -- which he signs by forming a gun with his hands. Apparently, "saying" his name violates the school's weapon policy.

- Feb. 24, 2012 - A drawing of a gun by a four-year-old resulted in the arrest of her father when he came to pick her up from school. He was detained by police and strip-searched while his children were questioned by social services. The gun his child depicted? A plastic toy that belonged to his kids.

Any gun of any kind, loaded or unloaded, operable or inoperable, including any object other than a firearm which is a look-a-like of a gun. This shall include, but is not limited to, pellet gun, paintball gun, stun gun, taser, BB gun, flare gun, nail gun, and air soft gun.

Josh's gun was not a firearm, because it was a pastry, and it seems highly unlikely that it qualified as a gun "look-a-like," again because it was a pastry. It certainly is nothing like any of the "look-a-like" items set forth in the list, largely because those items are not pastries.

Dear Parents and Guardians:

I am writing to let you know about an incident that occurred this morning in one of our classrooms and encourage you to discuss this matter with your child in a manner you deem most appropriate.

During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.

* * *

As you are aware, the ... Code of Student Conduct and appropriate consequences related to violations of the code are clearly spelled out in the Student Handbook, which was sent home during the first week of school and can be found on our website, www.aacps.org....
If your children express that they are troubled by today's incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.

Pretty sure that if your children are "troubled" by another kid biting a pastry into something that looks sort of like a gun and waving said pastry around, you have already failed as a parent.

• One proposal for college students to try to pay for rising tuition fees is for schools to take a cut of their students' future earnings in lieu of upfront tuition. Indentured servitude 2.0 might kill the classical liberal arts education, but oh well. [url]
• Baby boomers might be able to take college-level classes via iPads and chatrooms, but do they really want to? Mobile classes sound useful for students of any age, so why target just the baby boomers? (This exercise left to the reader.) [url]
• Sal Khan discusses the future of credentialing -- and how schools might be separated from the role of providing proof of proficiency. The future of microcredentials could offer a way for anyone to obtain proof of expertise in a narrowly-defined domain. [url]

The school offered a special lanyard with the RFID tag removed, in the hopes to put a damper on the whole situation. The student’s father refused the deal, however, because it came with strings attached.

“He told me in a meeting that if my daughter would proudly wear her student ID card around her neck so everyone could see, he would be able to quietly remove her chip from her student ID card,” Steve Hernandez told WND. “He went on to say as part of the accommodation my daughter and I would have to agree to stop criticizing the program and publicly support … it. I told him that was unacceptable because it would imply an endorsement of the district’s policy and my daughter and I should not have to give up our constitutional rights to speak out against a program that we feel is wrong.”

The Hernandez family decided to take action against the school with the help of the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties and human rights group which immediately took the view that the school district is looking for more public funding, which it can only receive if there is proof of positive student attendance rates. Rutherford attorneys filed a petition for the aforementioned TRO, as well as immediate injunctive and declaratory relief alleging that the school’s actions violate Hernandez’s rights under Texas’ Religious Freedom Act, the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

“The court’s willingness to grant a temporary restraining order is a good first step, but there is still a long way to go—not just in this case, but dealing with the mindset, in general, that everyone needs to be monitored and controlled,” John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, said in a statement. While the TRO has been granted, a hearing on the preliminary injunction will take place next week.

For more than forty years, the United States courts have recognized that students do not check their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door.

The Kentucky Supreme Court is considering a case from Nelson County that could require school officials to give the Miranda warning – You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you ... – when questioning a student with a school resource officer present.

Miranda warnings are required when a subject is in custody – when a suspect thinks he’s not free to leave – and at issue is whether a student grilled in the principal’s office inherently fits that description.

In a brief for N.C., assistant public advocate Robert Strong says that when a student is sent to the principal’s office, “He is not allowed to leave until the principal says so.” In other words, a reasonable student would conclude he was in custody, “given the coercive nature of the principal’s office,” Strong says.

The facts of that case, in which a 13-year-old was interviewed by police at school about a series of neighborhood thefts, were “eerily” similar to N.C.’s case, Strong said. The boy was escorted by an armed school resource officer to an office, where he was interviewed by the officer with an assistant principal present. Neither gave him a Miranda warning.

The U.S. Supreme Court noted the purpose behind Miranda is to keep subjects from being coerced into giving false confessions, to which children are particularly prone. “A reasonable child subjected to police questioning will sometimes feel pressured to submit when a reasonable adult would feel free to go,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court.

Simple investigations would be hamstrung and schools would be less safe if principals, every time they question a student, “must look into a crystal ball and predict, ‘This could lead to criminal charges, I have to Mirandize this child,’ ” said Wayne Young, executive director of the Kentucky Association of School Administrators.

“If a crime is being committed in school, if somebody is handing out pain medication, I don’t think we should be troubled with constitutional niceties.”

He said courts have given schools leeway on student free-speech issues and searches, which don’t require warrants in schools, because of the importance of maintaining safety and order on campus. “The goal is to protect all children, and it doesn’t bother me if a child’s constitutional protections are limited, if it is to protect all children,” he said.

Holland said the fear that safety would be compromised is ill-founded because the Miranda doctrine already contains an exception when there is an imminent threat – such as for questions about the existence or location of weapons on school grounds.

Even if a student’s answers are suppressed because of a Miranda violation and couldn’t be used in a criminal case, they still could be used to suspend or expel a student, he points out in “Schooling Miranda: Policing Interrogation in the 21st Century Schoolhouse.”

It is also likely that most students will waive their right to remain silent or to an attorney, he said. “Thus, the amount of information lost to Miranda would be slight.”

C. Mobile phones, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, Wikispaces, Google, and whatever other technologies you’re blocking are not inherently evil. Stop demonizing them and focus on people’s behavior, not the tools, particularly when it comes to making policy.

F. You never can promise 100% safety. For instance, you never would promise a parent that her child would never, ever be in a fight at school. So quit trying to guarantee 100% safety when it comes to technology. Provide reasonable supervision, implement reasonable procedures and policies, and move on.

G. The ‘online predators will prey on your schoolchildren’ argument is a false bogeyman, a scare tactic that is fed to us by the media, politicians, law enforcement, and computer security vendors. The number of reported incidents in the news of this occurring is zero.

H. Federal laws do not require your draconian filtering. You can’t point the finger somewhere else. You have to own it yourself.

K. There’s a difference between a teachable moment and a punishable moment. Lean toward the former as much as possible.

N. If you’re prohibiting teachers from being ‘friends’ with students online, are you also prohibiting them from being ‘friends’ with students in neighborhoods, at church, in volunteer organizations, at the mall, and in other non-school settings?

S. Unless you like losing lawsuits, remember that students and staff have speech and privacy rights, particularly off-campus. Remember that any dumb decision you make is Internet fodder and has a good chance of going viral online. Do you really want to be the next stupid administrator story on The Huffington Post?

Z. Educating is always, always more powerful than blocking.

The principal at Garrett High School claims their system tracks all the tweets on Twitter when a student logs in, meaning even if he did tweet it from home their system could have recognized it when he logged in again at school.

As the Netzpolitik.org article asks: who will be responsible for ensuring that the spy software does its job without breaking the German data protection laws? Has anyone thought about the security issues of introducing this software into schools? Will the software work on all platforms - and if it doesn't, what happens to schools using Macs or GNU/Linux?

Even leaving aside such issues, you have to wonder what on earth the German States' Culture Ministers were thinking when they agreed to allow this gross invasion of privacy of teachers and students. Perhaps they hoped that the fuss would all blow over after a while; in the wake of the other revelations about the German government spying on its citizens through software on their computers, that seems unlikely now.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

The proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile will be a giant stride toward providing ALL Texas children quality educational opportunities and experiences. Every Texas student, whether they attend school in inner-city Houston or in rural West Texas, should have access to modern technological advancements, including high-speed wireless Internet.

The resources made available by the merger would make high-speed wireless available to many Texans, both rural and urban. This is vitally important for schools in rural Texas that will finally have the ability to access a high-speed wireless broadband network and all it brings.

I know of what I speak when I say that Texas--in particular our rural schools--will benefit substantially from this merger. To deny the educational opportunities this merger would provide to students living in rural areas would do our children a disservice. This merger will ensure that every young Texan will be learning and performing to the best of their abilities.

The ACLU-PA hoped to use this case to help alert school officials across Pennsylvania to students' privacy rights in their cell phones. Very little case law exists discussing student-cell-phone searches. While the settlement forecloses a court ruling, the case has led the ACLU-PA to contact the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA), which this week agreed to work with the ACLU towards crafting guidelines for teachers and school officials to help them better handle situations involving student cell phones and other electronic devices without unlawfully invading student privacy. Walczak noted that the goal was to prevent future violations of students' constitutional rights.

It will do nothing to improve behaviour in schools where teachers are not respected by their students.

However, it could have a negative impact in other ways, as it enforces the idea that schools are places where "technology" is something out there, a word processor or spreadsheet on a desktop PC to be used for a particular purpose, instead of something that permeates all aspects of our daily lives and is becoming increasingly important.

Punish him, insisted the parents.

"I said, 'This occurred out of school, on a weekend,' " recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. "We can't discipline him."

Had they contacted the boy's family, he asked.

Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.

What about the police, Mr. Orsini asked.

A criminal investigation would be protracted, the parents had decided, its outcome uncertain. They wanted immediate action.

"Back at district offices, the Robbins motion says, employees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into "a little LMSD soap opera," a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program. "I know, I love it," she is quoted as having replied."

One family involved in the suit provided evidence that their 15-year-old son was photographed more than 400 times over the course of two weeks last fall (his laptop was neither missing or stolen), but their lawyer provided just one surprisingly well lit and framed (for a laptop) photo taken of their son sleeping. The school district has subsequently issued a statement admitting the system took photos, but denying that they engaged in any deliberate wrong doing or that the photos were used for any "inappropriate purposes." Senator Arlen Specter, engaged in a heated battle for re-election, used the story as a springboard to call for tougher federal wiretap laws. Specter went so far as to hold a hearing near the school, where one parent insisted that warnings would be enough:

"Bob Wegbreit said a warning might suffice to let families know the district might activate webcams without a student's knowledge. Students could then choose to keep the computers in other parts of the house, instead of their bedrooms, said Wegbreit, whose group fears the lawsuit will damage the upscale district's finances and reputation."

With some of my colleagues, I began a reverse engineering effort against LANRev in order to determine the nature of the threat and possible countermeasures. Some of the things we found at first left us aghast as security pros: the spyware "client" (they call it an agent) binds to the server permanently without using authentication or key distribution. Find an unbound agent on your network with Bonjour, click on it, you own it. The server software, with an externally facing Internet port... runs as root. I'm not kidding. For those unfamiliar with the principle of least privilege- this is an indicator of a highly unskilled design. Unfortunately, when we got down to basic forensics, LANRev appears to cover its tracks well.

Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.

"It's made a big difference," said J. J. Johnson, the bus's driver. "Boys aren't hitting each other, girls are busy, and there's not so much jumping around."