School censorship continues in 2010

The first encounter I had with the censorship of books in school libraries came 25 years ago, when I was editor of the newspaper in Lamar, Missouri, population 4,000.
The book in question was one that has been at the top of banned book lists for the past half-century, The Catcher in the Rye.

The chronicle of Holden Caulfield’s coming of age was included in a list of books that Lamar High School students could read for their English classes. As is usually the case when the fires of censorship spread through a school or community, the controversy began with a parent seeing four-letter words in a book, and then not bothering to read the book to see the context because “I don’t read any book that has words like that in it and neither will my child.”

One particular board member, a professional in the community, led the opposition forces.

The high school library was packed with parents, most opposing Catcher in the Rye, but a hardy few supporting the book. After they had all been heard from, the board voted unanimously to remove the book from the reading list, but to allow the librarian to keep it behind the counter where those who wished to read it could check it out, as long as it was not being used for classroom purposes.

Who knows how many times that scenario plays out in communities across the nation? Sometimes it is language, sometimes it may be sex, or it may even be violence. But somehow there are always people (many of whom are watching far worse on network and cable television) who want to play morals chairman for the rest of the community. In most cases, the media never becomes aware of the situation.

And it is not just books like Catcher in the Rye. The lists of books that concerned parents want removed from school library bookshelves includes classics such as Huckleberry Finn, which has almost been totally sacrificed at the altar of political correctness and the Harry Potter books, which, of course, convince children that they can conduct spells and play games in mid-air.

I can’t say that it is an isolated incident, for most assuredly that would be incorrect, but another book-banning incident took place this last week in Stockton, Missouri, about 40 miles from Lamar.

This time the book in question is of a more recent vintage. The Stockton R-2 Board of Education voted unanimously to remove the 2007 winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, from the library entirely.

The saga began, as usual, with a parent complaint about the book, which contains some strong language and brief sexual content. According to the community newspaper, The Cedar County Republican, the school superintendent appointed a committee, which included the high school principal, English teachers, a board member, two parents, and a young adult, to study the book and make recommendations.
The panel recommended that the book be removed from the classroom reading list, but be kept in the library.

The board rejected that view. From the Cedar County Republican article:

The board was presented with this assessment by the committee during the meeting. After a pause, board member Rod Tucker spoke up against the book, “I brought my kids here to protect them as much as I could from city atmosphere,” he said. “I vote we remove the book from the school.” After a quick motion and second by Dean Pate, the banning of the book was unanimously passed.


“I thought the content was inappropriate,” school board member and committee member Shipley said. “I can only speak for myself, but I assume others on the board had heard enough about it from other people to want to pull it out of the school. I encourage people to read it and judge for themselves if they think it’s appropriate.”

The English teachers were upset that some of the board members cast their negative votes without ever bothering to read the book.

Veteran English teacher Kim Chism Jasper was one of those who was upset by the decision:

“This book is a National Book Award winner for Young People’s Literature, and it is taught in many schools throughout the country, often at the ninth-grade level,” Jasper said. “It has been challenged in many places, but that is not unusual for books that promote discussion. In fact many books — including “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Macbeth,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Little House in the Big Woods” and the Bible — have been challenged. The book focuses on a 14-year-old who has hopes and dreams of leaving the poverty of his reservation and making something of his life. Education and reading open the door to those dreams. In light of that, denying access to reading material is ironic. I hope people in the community will read this book. And, of course, I hope people who believe in the students’ right to read will contact board members.”

Mrs. Jasper should not expect the board to change its decision. That rarely happens. In a day and age when we English teachers have a hard enough time getting students to read, it is a sin to remove the kind of literature that could actually turn them into lifelong readers and improve their chances of success in high school, college, and life.

Still, my expectation is that many Stockton High School students will find a way to get their hands on The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian.

After all, when the Lamar R-1 Board of Education voted a quarter of a century ago to remove Catcher in the Rye from the classroom and put it behind the library counter, the first student to check out the book was the son of the school board member who led the opposition against it.

Nine teens arrested after bullying leads to suicide

Today's New York Times features an article about nine teenagers being arrested after their bullying allegedly led a girl to commit suicide:

By ERIK ECKHOLM and KATIE ZEZIMA

It is not clear what some students at South Hadley High School expected to achieve by subjecting a freshman to the relentless taunting described by a prosecutor and classmates.
Certainly not her suicide. And certainly not the multiple felony indictments announced on Monday against several students at the Massachusetts school.
The prosecutor brought charges Monday against nine teenagers, saying their taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale and led the freshman, Phoebe Prince, to hang herself from a stairwell in January. The charges were an unusually sharp legal response to the problem of adolescent bullying, which is increasingly conducted in cyberspace as well as in the schoolyard and has drawn growing concern from parents, educators and lawmakers.

In the uproar around the suicides of Ms. Prince, 15, and an 11-year-old boy subjected to harassment in nearby Springfield last year, the Massachusetts legislature stepped up work on an anti-bullying law that is now near passage. The law would require school staff members to report suspected incidents and principals to investigate them. It would also demand that schools teach about the dangers of bullying. Forty-one other states have anti-bullying laws of varying strength.
In the Prince case, two boys and four girls, ages 16 to 18, face a different mix of felony charges that include statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. Three younger girls have been charged in juvenile court, Elizabeth D. Scheibel, the Northwestern district attorney, said at a news conference in Northampton, Mass.

Appearing with state and local police officials on Monday, Ms. Scheibel said that Ms. Prince’s suicide came after nearly three months of severe taunting and physical threats by a cluster of fellow students.
“The investigation revealed relentless activities directed toward Phoebe to make it impossible for her to stay at school,” Ms. Scheibel said. The conduct of those charged, she said, “far exceeded the limits of normal teenage relationship-related quarrels.”

It was particularly alarming, the district attorney said, that some teachers, administrators and other staff members at the school were aware of the harassment but did not stop it. “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome,” Ms. Scheibel said, but did not violate any laws.
Christine Swelko, assistant superintendent for South Hadley Public Schools, said school officials planned to meet with the district attorney this week or next. “We will then review this evidence and particularly the new information which the district attorney’s office has but did not come to light within the investigation conducted by the school,” Ms. Swelko said in a statement.

Ms. Prince’s family had recently moved to the United States from a small town in Ireland, and she entered South Hadley last fall. The taunting started when she had a brief relationship with a popular senior boy; some students reportedly called her an “Irish slut,” knocked books out of her hands and sent her threatening text messages, day after day.
At South Hadley High School, which has about 700 students, most students and teachers refused on Monday to talk about the case. Students waited for parents in the pouring rain and a sports team ran by, with one student telling reporters, “Go away.”
Ashlee Dunn, a 16-year-old sophomore, said she had not known Ms. Prince personally but had heard stories spread about her in the hallways.
“She was new and she was from a different country, and she didn’t really know the school very well,” Ms. Dunn said. “I think that’s probably one reason why they chose Phoebe.”
On Jan. 14, the investigation found, students abused her in the school library, the lunchroom and the hallways and threw a canned drink at her as she walked home. Her sister found her hanging from a stairwell at home, still in her school clothes, at 4:30 p.m.
Some of the students plotted against Ms. Prince on the Internet, using social networking sites, but the main abuse was at school, the prosecutor said.

“The actions of these students were primarily conducted on school grounds during school hours and while school was in session,” Ms. Scheibel said.

Ms. Scheibel declined to provide details about the charges of statutory rape against two boys, but experts said those charges could mean that the boys had sex with Ms. Prince when she was under age.

Legal experts said they were not aware of other cases in which students faced serious criminal charges for harassing a fellow student, but added that the circumstances in this case appeared to be extreme and that juvenile charges were usually kept private.
The Massachusetts House and Senate have passed versions of an anti-bullying law, but disagreement remains on whether all schools will be required to conduct staff training about bullying — a provision in about half the states with such laws and one that is vital, said Robert O. Trestan, Eastern States Civil Rights Counsel of the Anti-Defamation League, which has led the effort for legislation in Massachusetts.

The prospective law, Mr. Trestan said, is aimed at changing school cultures and preventing bullying, but would not label bullying a crime because it is a vague concept. “These indictments tell us that middle school and high school kids are not immune from criminal laws,” he said. “If they violate them in the course of bullying someone, they’ll be held accountable. We don’t need to create a new crime.”

Lawsuit filed against Mississippi school that canceled prom to keep lesbian from attending with girlfriend

(CNN) -- A Mississippi high school faces a lawsuit over its decision to cancel its prom rather than allow a lesbian high school student to attend with her girlfriend.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, alleges that officials at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, are violating the student's First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

The ACLU asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi to reinstate the prom.

"All I wanted was the same chance to enjoy my prom night like any other student. But my school would rather hurt all the students than treat everyone fairly," said the student, 18-year-old Constance McMillen, in an ACLU news release. "This isn't just about me and my rights anymore -- now I'm fighting for the right of all the students at my school to have our prom."

At the center of the lawsuit is a memorandum from the school to students, dated February 5, which states that prom dates must be of the opposite sex.

Also, when McMillen expressed a desire to wear a tuxedo to the prom, the superintendent told her only male students were allowed to wear tuxes, according to court documents.

Superintendent Teresa McNeece also told McMillen that she and her girlfriend could be ejected from the prom if any of the other students complained about their presence there, according to the documents.

The prom was canceled after McMillen and the ACLU tried informally to get the school to change its stance.

Officials at the Itawamba County School District were not immediately available for comment Thursday.

In a statement released Wednesday, the county's board of education said that, "Due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events, the Itawamba County School District has decided to not host a prom at Itawamba Agricultural High School this year."

The school hoped that private citizens in the community would organize an event to replace the prom, the statement said.

The decision was made, the board of education said, "taking into consideration the education, safety and well-being of our students."

"Itawamba school officials are trying to turn [McMillen] into the villain who called the whole thing off, and that just isn't what happened," said Kristy Bennett, Legal Director of the ACLU of Mississippi. She's fighting for everyone to be able to enjoy the prom.

"The government, and that includes public schools, can't censor someone's free expression just because some other person might not like it."

Student's Facebook site protected fy FIrst Amendment

Miami, Florida (CNN) -- A former Florida high school student who was suspended by her principal after she set up a Facebook page to criticize her teacher is protected constitutionally under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate ruled.

U.S. Magistrate Barry Garber's ruling, in a case viewed as important by Internet watchers, denied the principal's motion to dismiss the case and allows a lawsuit by the student to move forward.

"We have constitutional values that will always need to be redefined due to changes in technology and society," said Ryan Calo, an attorney with Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

"The fact that students communicate on a semi-public platform creates new constitutional issues and the courts are sorting them out," Calo said.

Katherine Evans, now 19 and attending college, was suspended in 2007 from Pembroke Pines Charter High School after she used her home computer to create a Facebook page titled, "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met."

In his order, Garber found that the student had a constitutional right to express her views on the social networking site.

"Evans' speech falls under the wide umbrella of protected speech," he wrote. "It was an opinion of a student about a teacher, that was published off-campus ... was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior."

Matthew Bavaro, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing Evans, was pleased with the ruling.

"The First Amendment provides protection for free speech regardless of the forum, being the Internet, the living room or a restaurant," he told CNN.

On the Facebook page created by Evans, which included a picture of her teacher, Evans wrote: "To those select students who have had the displeasure of having Ms. Sarah Phelps, or simply knowing her and her insane antics: Here is the place to express your feelings of hatred."

According to court documents, Phelps never saw the posting, which was made from a home computer after school hours.

After receiving three comments from people who criticized her and supported the teacher, Evans removed the page from Facebook.

School principal Peter Bayer suspended Evans, an honor student, for three days for disruptive behavior and cyberbullying of a staff member. Bayer also removed her from Advanced Placement classes and assigned her to regular classes.

Bavaro, Evans' attorney, is seeking to have the court find the school's suspension invalid and to have documents related to the suspension removed from her school file.

"It will eliminate any official public record and validate her rights, since her First Amendment rights were violated," he said.

Internet experts say the court got it right, and that the ruling shows the law evolving with society.

"It reassures Internet users and students that they can still speak their mind," Calo said. "Its not a security issue. Its personal opinion and gossip."

Calo believes high-profile campus shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech have made schools more security conscious. But in this case, the principal went too far, he said.

"I think this is just an example of an overreaction on the part of an administrator to speech outside the classroom," he said.

"It used to be that principals wouldn't hear you talking about teachers outside the class. Social networks give principals the ability to see what students are saying about teachers and each other.

"It's one thing to use that information to identify illegal or dangerous conduct. It's quite another to punish opinion and speech outside the classroom that doesn't disrupt the activities of the classroom," he told CNN.

Bavaro said Evans is not granting media interviews at this time. He said she is not seeking to get rich from her lawsuit.

"We are only seeking nominal, token damages. Maybe $100. Some token amount to show that her rights were violated," he said. This case is not about money."

An attorney representing Bayer, the school principal, did not return CNN's calls for comment.

High school students hack into school computers, change grades

Students at a Washington area high school hacked into the school district's computers, changing grades, according to an article in this morning's Washington Post:

By Michael Birnbaum and Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 29, 2010; B01

Students at a Potomac high school hacked into the school's computer system and changed class grades, according to sources briefed by the school's principal, and officials are investigating how widespread the damage might be.

The incident prompted an emergency staff meeting at Churchill High School, a top school in one of the nation's premier public systems, and a recorded phone message to parents Wednesday saying that grades might have been corrupted by the hackers.

The extent of the apparent security breach was not immediately clear. Teachers at the school were being asked to review their grades for discrepancies. The students involved used a computer program to capture passwords from at least one teacher, according to school sources familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

"We are investigating an allegation that some students compromised our grading system and may have changed some grades," said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the school system. "We're in the process of interviewing students."

He said teachers discovered a problem earlier this week and brought it to the attention of the school's administration. According to one source, an information technology department worker came to the school this week to interview students.

"We take the security of student info and data very, very seriously," he said. "If it's found that students did breach the system and change the grades, it would be a very, very serious violation."

At an emergency meeting Wednesday morning, Churchill's principal, Joan C. Benz, informed teachers and staff members that students obtained access to the grading system and modified grades, according to three sources familiar with the meeting, two of whom were present.

Benz did not respond to a phone message left at her home Thursday night.

Teachers were told to check grades for anomalies and correct them before first semester report cards are released Feb. 3, according to the sources. But because teachers at the school no longer keep separate log books of their grades, it might be difficult to go back and find a student's original grade, the sources said.

Some teachers are careful to print out grades immediately after entering them in the system, one source said, but if grades were left on the computer system for any length of time before they were printed out, they could have been modified even on the printed version.

School officials urged Churchill teachers to change their passwords immediately and rotate them more often, the sources said.

The 2,100-student school has a 98 percent graduation rate, 11 points higher than Montgomery County as a whole. Its average SAT scores were 1820 out of a possible 2400 in the 2008-09 school year, the second highest in the county.

News of the incident swept through hallways Thursday, students said.

"There's obviously a lot of rumors going around the school," said Churchill senior Kelsey O'Donnell, 18. "They asked one of my friends if she wanted her grades changed, and she said no. . . . When she found out that they got in trouble, she was so happy that she wasn't a part of it."

Do students have a right to be mean online

School officials' attempts to cut down on cyberbullying are running into roadblocks in the court, according to an article in today's Los Angeles Times:

By Victoria Kim

December 13, 2009


One morning in May 2008, an eighth-grader walked into Janice Hart's office at a Beverly Hills school crying.

She was upset and humiliated and couldn't possibly go to class, the girl told the counselor. The night before, a classmate had posted a video on YouTube with a group of other eighth-graders bad-mouthing her, calling her "spoiled," a "brat" and a "slut." Text and instant messages had been flying since. Half the class must have seen it by now, she told Hart.

Hart took the problem to the vice principal and principal, who took it to a district administrator, who asked the district's lawyers what they could do about it. In the end, citing "cyber-bullying" concerns, school officials suspended the girl who posted the video for two days. That student took the case to federal court, saying her free speech rights had been violated.

Last month, a federal judge in Los Angeles sided with her, saying the school had gone too far. Amid rising concerns over cyber-bullying, and even calls for criminalization, some courts, parents and free-speech advocates are pushing back. Students, they say, have a 1st Amendment right to be nasty in cyberspace.

"To allow the school to cast this wide a net and suspend a student simply because another student takes offense to their speech, without any evidence that such speech caused a substantial disruption of the school's activities, runs afoul" of the law, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson wrote in a 60-page opinion.

"The court cannot uphold school discipline of student speech simply because young persons are unpredictable or immature, or because, in general, teenagers are emotionally fragile and may often fight over hurtful comments," he wrote.

Schools' ability to limit student speech, from armbands protesting the Vietnam War to banners promoting marijuana use, is an age-old issue that has been repeatedly tried and tested in the courts. But with teens' social lives moving increasingly to cyberspace, where what might have previously been private bickering is reproduced, publicized and documented for all to see, school officials find themselves on unfamiliar ground in dealing with e-mails, instant messages, profile pages, videos and the like that may result in hurt feelings or something more serious.

Free-speech advocates said the notoriety of recent cases, such as the Missouri girl who committed suicide after a mean-spirited MySpace message was sent, have led schools to overreact and excessively crack down on student expression when it comes to the Internet.

"It's better to have a lawsuit and lose some money than have a situation where a student commits suicide," said Eugene Volokh, a 1st Amendment expert and UCLA law professor who has criticized a bill in Congress that would make cyber-bullying punishable by up to two years in prison. "People don't appreciate how much the 1st Amendment protects not only political and ideological speech, but also personal nastiness and chatter. . . . If all cruel teasing led to suicide, the human race would be extinct."

The murkiness of this area of law and educational policy has resulted in legal challenges across the country over school officials' restriction of student speech or discipline meted out in such cases.

Attorneys and experts said court decisions have been "all over the map," offering little clarity to confused school administrators. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to take up a case involving student speech online; the governing decision is from the 1969 Tinker vs. Des Moines School District case, which held that student speech could not be limited unless it caused substantial disruption on campus.

"We're in a rapidly evolving area of law with relatively few guidelines and remarkably little that has been charted," said Robert O'Neil, director of the Virginia-based Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

O'Neil said that when a true threat is made, and when speech is made using school computers, schools have clear authority to regulate students' speech. But when something falls in the gray area between an expressed threat and mere teasing, and students are accessing the Internet outside the school's walls, administrators are faced with a tricky calculus.

"Everybody is justifiably confused about what they can and cannot do," said Witold Walczak, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

In Pennsylvania, a student sued his school district after he was suspended for 10 days and placed in an alternative education program for creating what he claimed was a parody MySpace profile of the school principal. On the website, the student referred to the principal as a "big steroid freak," and a "big whore," among other things, and stated that he was "too drunk to remember" the date of his birthday.

U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry found that even though the profile was unquestionably "lewd, profane and sexually inappropriate," the school did not have the right to restrict the student's speech because school officials were not able to establish that the profile caused enough of a disruption on campus.

"The mere fact that the Internet may be accessed at school does not authorize school officials to become censors of the World Wide Web," he wrote.

Walczak, the ACLU attorney who argued the case, said censoring is often the "easy way out" for schools that want to be able to say they did something about the situation rather than stand by and watch.

"The Internet doesn't change what students say about other students or school officials, it just makes it more apparent to a larger number of people," he said.

The school district has appealed to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, where a decision is pending.

In Florida, the ACLU sued a principal on behalf of a student who was suspended and removed from her honors class for alleged cyber-bullying. Katie Evans had created a Facebook page criticizing an English teacher as "the worst teacher I've ever met" and invited others to express their "feelings of hatred."

Her attorney, Matthew Bavaro, said the reach of the Web was irrelevant to whether students are allowed to express themselves freely.

"The audience, whether it's one person or 1 billion people, doesn't change that Katie still had a 1st Amendment right," Bavaro said.

In the Beverly Hills case, the student's lawsuit said her "speech" was entirely off campus and off-limits to the school administrators' regulation. The four-minute, 36-second video, in which a group of friends is chatting at a restaurant four blocks from campus, could not even be viewed at school because YouTube is blocked on the school's computers, her attorney contended.

Judge Wilson ruled that school officials had the authority to investigate the matter because the student told several of her classmates to watch the video, and it was foreseeable the video, or talk of it, would quickly make its way to the campus of Beverly Vista School. The video was "designed in such a manner to reach many persons at once," making it different from earlier cases involving school newspapers or a violent drawing, he found.

However, he ruled that the chatter in the video did not rise to a level that would cause enough disruption at the school to warrant the discipline.

"The fear that students would 'gossip' or 'pass notes' in class simply does not rise to the level of a substantial disruption," he wrote.

The plaintiff's attorney, Evan Cohen, who is also her father, said the case highlighted the school district's failure to realize the limits of its authority.

"Yeah, sure, they can fall back on cyber-bullying, but when you actually ask them questions and dig down deep into their understanding, they think it's OK for them to be a super-parent," he said.

Cohen's daughter, now a high school sophomore, is glad to put the case behind her and move on with her life, he said. She will be awarded nominal damages of $1 from the school, he said, and her two-day suspension will probably soon be removed from her academic record.

Attorney Gary Gibeaut, who represented the Beverly Hills Unified School District, declined to comment, saying the district had not decided whether to appeal the decision.

Texting common despite school bans

Schools may have rules against texting, but students are ignoring them in greater numbers.

In its latest edition, the Wichita Eagle takes a look at the phenomenon:

It's fairly easy to get away with using a cell phone, especially with teachers who aren't very strict, added Ashton Bethel, a Southeast sophomore.

"You just go under the desk and hide it," she said.

A recent national poll shows that these Wichita-area students are in the majority when it comes to surreptitious cell phone use by teens.

About two-thirds of students who are supposed to keep their phones off use them during the school day anyway, according to an online survey commissioned by Common Sense Media, a California nonprofit that researches how media affects children.

"Even at the junior high level, they're breaking out iPhones," said Bailey Ketterman, who has worked as a substitute teacher at several Wichita-area suburban districts. "It's definitely a widespread problem."

Judge tentatively acquits MySpace mother

A federal court judge tentatively threw out the conviction of a Missouri woman who pretended to be a teenage boy on MySpace, starting a chain of events that led to a 13-year-old girl's suicide.

The following article comes from CNN:

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- A federal judge tentatively overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman accused of using MySpace to deceive a teenage girl who eventually committed suicide, a U.S. attorney's spokesman told CNN.

A jury convicted Lori Drew, 49, of O'Fallon, Missouri, in November on three misdemeanor counts of accessing protected computers without authorization. Prosecutors argued that Drew illegally used the social networking site to humiliate a 13-year-old girl, who authorities said killed herself after receiving derogatory messages.

Drew was to be sentenced Thursday, but California U.S. District Judge George Wu -- who heard the case because MySpace is based in Los Angeles -- instead decided to not uphold the jury's finding.

Prosecutors based their case on a federal computer crimes statute that Wu is now challenging.

Using the statute, prosecutors accused Drew of violating the social networking site's terms of service, which prohibits creating fraudulent registration information, using accounts to obtain personal information about juvenile members and using MySpace to "harass, abuse or harm other members."

Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles, told CNN that Wu said in court if Drew is convicted of illegally accessing computers, the guilty verdict would set a precedent and anyone who has ever violated MySpace's terms of service could also be found guilty of a misdemeanor.

"It appears that the judge is basing his decision on his conclusion that the misdemeanor statute is constitutionally vague," Mrozek wrote in an e-mail to CNN.

Wu said his decision will become final once he files a written ruling, according to Mrozek.

The misdemeanor charges -- which Drew is tentatively cleared of with Wu's action -- stemmed from an elaborate hoax played out on MySpace.

The prosecution accused Drew of using the site to inflict emotional distress on Megan Meier. Prosecutors alleged during the trial that Drew -- worried that Meier had spread malicious rumors about her daughter -- used MySpace to pose as a 16-year-old boy, "Josh Evans," who feigned romantic interest in Meier.

Meier killed herself after the "boy" spurned her and at one point told her via the Internet that the world would be a better place without her, according to prosecutors.

Jurors declared a mistrial on a more serious conspiracy charge.

Prosecutors sought the maximum three-year sentence for Drew on the misdemeanor convictions.

The U.S. Justice Department plans to explore other legal options against Drew, Mrozek said. Prosecutors might appeal the case's dismissal and consider refilling the conspiracy charge, he said.

Is cyberspying on students legal?

Today's Dayton Daily News in Ohio offers an exploration of police and school officials spying on teen internet activity on sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube:

Police officers assigned to schools in the region say they go online to check social networking sites and have found evidence of students bullying others, making threats and planning fights.

John Simmons, safety and security coordinator at Miami Valley Career Technology Center in Englewood, said he has personal MySpace and Facebook accounts and that he checks traffic on Yahoo! YouTube, AOL, Instant Messengers and other networks.

His vocational school assigns wireless laptop computers to each of its nearly 2,000 high school-age students.

Simmons, who is also a part-time Clayton police detective, said he has a legal obligation to enforce laws that require the school to ensure computer safety for its students, and to learn whether students are using the equipment for bad behavior or getting access to inappropriate Web sites.

Students who go astray can risk suspension, expulsion or even face charges in courts if the offenses are serious enough, Simmons said.

The article indicates not everyone thinks this kind of policing is the right way to go:

Police need to exercise restraint in developing suspicions on the basis of what is said on social networking sites, said Carrie Davis, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

“Really, what they’re doing is using people’s speech and associations as a basis for suspicion,” Davis said.

Student strip search case headed for Supreme Court

A middle school who was strip searched for drugs in Arizona is suing the school district and the case has gone all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The following article is taken from today's Washington Post:

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 11, 2009; A01

SAFFORD, Ariz. -- April Redding was waiting in the parking lot of the middle school when she heard news she could hardly understand: Her 13-year-old daughter, Savana, had been strip-searched by school officials in a futile hunt for drugs.

It's a story that amazes and enrages her still, more than six years later, though she has relived it many times since.

Savana Redding was forced to strip to her underwear in the school nurse's office. She was made to expose her breasts and pubic area to prove she was not hiding pills. And the drugs being sought were prescription-strength ibuprofen, equivalent to two Advils.

"I guess it's the fact that they think they were not wrong, they're not remorseful, never said they were sorry," April Redding said this week, as she and Savana talked about the legal fight over that search, which has now reached the Supreme Court.

And even more: When, days later, the principal met with April Redding to discuss what had happened, she said he was dismissive of an event so humiliating that her daughter never returned to classes at Safford Middle School.

"He said, 'There was an incident with some pills, and we had to find out if Savana had them, but you should be happy because we didn't find any on her,' " Redding recalled. "I got really upset and was telling him, 'Why did you do this to her? How could you do this to her?' "

From the yellow-brick school in this dusty town of cotton fields and copper mines to the Supreme Court, the lawsuit that April and Savana Redding brought carries the potential for redefining the privacy rights of students and the responsibility of teachers and school officials charged with keeping drugs off their campuses.

Matthew W. Wright, the school system's lawyer, declined to make his clients available for interviews. But in a statement, he said he regrets the news media's "reflexive reaction" to the case and underscored the dilemma school officials face between privacy and protection.

"Unfortunately, this tension sometimes places school officials in the untenable position of either facing the threat of lawsuits for their attempts to enforce a drug-free policy or for their laxity in failing to interdict potentially harmful drugs," he wrote.

To which Savana Redding's lawyer, Adam Wolf of the American Civil Liberties Union, replied: "The school official here heard an accusation that Savana previously possessed ibuprofen at some unknown location at some unknown time and jumped to the conclusion that Savana was presently storing ibuprofen and that she was storing it against her genitalia.

"It should be self-evident that that search is wrong."

But the federal judges who have reviewed the case have not been so sure.

The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit eventually ruled that the search violated Savana's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and that Vice Principal Kerry Wilson could be found personally liable for ordering the search.

"The public school officials who strip searched Savana acted contrary to all reason and common sense," wrote Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, who reached back to a previous court decision for the quote that has come to define the case:

"It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a thirteen-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude."

On the other hand, it apparently stumped other constitutional scholars. The first judge who heard the Reddings' case agreed with the school system that the search was justified because of accusations that school officials had heard about Savana. He threw out the suit.

A divided three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit upheld that decision.

And while eight judges on the circuit eventually ruled that the search was unconstitutional, several of the judges said Wilson could not have been expected to navigate the shifting legal standards for when such searches are allowed.

"Searches are often fruitless, and students' motives are often benign, but teachers, unlike courts, do not act with the benefit of hindsight," wrote Judge Michael Daly Hawkins.

The backdrop for the case is a 1985 Supreme Court decision that said school officials need to have only reasonable suspicions, rather than probable cause, to search individual students. That case involved the search of a student's purse, but the justices cautioned against a search "excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction."

Safford officials say in court briefs that they were on high alert in October 2003 because the year before, a student nearly died after taking prescription medication brought to school by a friend. And they said they had good reason to be suspicious of Savana Redding, despite her honor-roll grades and spotless disciplinary record.

They had received a complaint from one student that, before a dance earlier in the year, students drank alcohol at a party hosted by Redding and her mother. On the day of the search, a student told officials he had been given a prescription-strength ibuprofen tablet by a friend of Redding's.

When that girl was discovered to be carrying such pills, she said she received them from Redding.

Savana Redding said both allegations were lies -- the boy had not even been at the party, she said. But what happened next is not in dispute.

Vice Principal Wilson removed her from class and brought her to his office. She gave permission for a search of her backpack, which turned up nothing.

Then Wilson told her to go to the nurse's office with two female staffers. They told her to remove her socks and shoes, her stretch pants and pink T-shirt. They told her to move her bra from side to side, which exposed her breasts, and pull out the waistband of her underwear.

"I did what they told me to do -- I didn't want to look at them, though," Redding recalled. "If I had looked at them, I probably would have cried. I was trying not to."

She never attended classes again at Safford Middle School -- "I just couldn't go back," she said. She developed ulcers in high school, and the girl who, according to her mother, "would rather be at school than anywhere else" eventually dropped out.

Now 19, she took placement tests to get into nearby Eastern Arizona College and gives interviews to the national media in a small frame house just off the Old West Highway, which runs through the center of town.

"It's something that I really want to see through," Redding said of the lawsuit. "It's just that I'm one of those kinds of people who don't even want to get up in class and talk in front of people, so it's just going through it, over and over . . ."

She recently saw a flyer at the college that advertised a class that was going to discuss her case. She hears from "a lot of people [who] would find me through MySpace or something and then send me messages like, 'Hey, you're that girl that got strip-searched.' Yeah, I'm that girl, thanks."

But she didn't know about a new group on Facebook. It's called "Friends of Savana Redding."

"Really?" she asked.

New California law expels students for internet taunting

California is cracking down on students who bully other students over the internet or via text messaging. A new law which allows schools to expel students who commit cyberbullying takes effect in California Jan. 1:

By Peter Hecht
phecht@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Dec. 28, 2008

It was bad enough when middle school students in Novato last year harassed and ridiculed 14-year-old Olivia when she suffered a seizure on campus.

But her torment only worsened when the girl went online and discovered a MySpace page full of taunts, slurs and threats directed at her. Her classmates had dubbed the page "Olivia Haters."

The case of the Novato teen would inspire a book, "Letters to a Bullied Girl: Messages of Healing and Hope." It would also stir a hand-wringing discussion over the emotional cruelty of school bullying and the power of the Internet to make it even more severe.

On Jan. 1, a new California law will give schools authority to suspend or expel students for bullying fellow students over the Internet, in text-messaging or by other electronic means.

Assembly Bill 86 by Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, adds cyberbullying to school disciplinary codes that previously defined bullying only in terms of direct physical or verbal harassment.

Lieu said he sponsored the legislation out of concern that the Internet has become a prime tool among students "to intimidate, harass or bully another person at school."

"You're dealing with some very fragile egos at these age levels," Lieu said. "Some people can be driven over the edge and do some horrible things."

Among those horrible things was the tragic death of Megan Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl who hanged herself in 2006 after being spurned by someone she thought was an online love interest.

Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan's friends, harassed the girl by creating a phony MySpace page under the name of a fictional "Josh Evans." She was convicted in November of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers to inflict emotional distress.

In Novato, the wounds for Olivia were so searing that her mother moved her to another junior high school, only to have her daughter face more harassment after her new classmates learned of the "Olivia Haters" page.

After Olivia's mother, Kathleen Gardner, told the San Francisco Chronicle about her daughter's devastation, something remarkable happened.

The family was deluged with sympathetic letters from people young and old who told of their own suffering from school bullying - or who apologized for years-old acts of bullying.

The letters became the basis for "Letters to a Bullied Girl," published by Harper Collins.

"I am a parent of a 13-year-old girl who was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit this year after a suicide attempt or 'bullycide' attempt," read one letter, signed "A distraught mother." "I don't want other parents and children to experience this fate. So what is being done? And what can we do to change this?"

Gardner said in a recent interview that she had spoken to several "parents of kids who have been bullied or cyberbullied or both, and committed suicide."

AfterAB86 was signed into law, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said in a statement that "intimidation or harassment ... will not be tolerated at any school, on any playground" or online.

"Whether it's hurtful e-mails or abusive actions, we must protect those who suffer at the hands of bullies," O'Connell said.

The cyberbullying legislation was backed by the California Teachers Association and California PTA, the Anti- Defamation League, the American Electronics Association and Microsoft Corp.

"We see cyberbullying as a threat to creating a safe online environment for children," said Doug Free, a Northern California spokesman for Microsoft.

According to a June 2007 Pew Research Center study, nearly one-third of teenagers using the Internet reported being annoyed or harassed.

Thirteen percent said they had received threatening or aggressive e-mails. Another 13 percent said rumors about them were spread online. And 6 percent said embarrassing photographs were posted online without their permission.

At Sacramento's McClatchy High School, Principal Cynthia Clark said student altercations on campus often start online.

"We have had conflict resolutions in which we traced back disagreements to when they were on MySpace or text messaging," she said. "It's another vehicle kids use to insult their friends in immature ways."

Clark said students have come to her office with cell phone text messages to document threats.

"They say, this student is saying this about me. Can you help me stop it?" Clark said. McClatchy junior Sydney Tibbitts, 16, said she saw a classmate reduced to sobs after unflattering photographs were circulated online by fellow students.

"She was so upset. She had no idea who it was (sending out material) and she was scared,Tibbitts said.

In September, the Vallejo City Unified School District passed a sweeping policy banning students from using computers or cell phones to send harassing or threatening messages, or to cheat on exams.

District spokesman Jason Hodge said officials became alarmed by students sending text or instant messages to incite campus fights. In some cases, he said, altercations were incited by students wanting to make cell phone videos to post on YouTube.

"A kid would go up to another kid, say it's time to fight and then post it online," said Hodge, who said the district's policy also bans videotaping without permission. "Bullying is an age-old event. It's just gone onto the Internet because that's where the kids are now. And schools have to catch up."

Massachusetts school eliminates dances due to alcohol problems

A Massachusetts high school has taken action against teen drinking by eliminating dances, according to an article in today's Boston Globe.

By KEITH O'BRIEN
Boston Globe

BELMONT - Of the dozen or so students who had to be pulled off the dance floor for being intoxicated at the Belmont High School's Hoedown last March, principal Mike Harvey recalls one 18-year-old senior in particular.

Unable to reach his parents, administrators placed the wobbly student in police custody - not to be charged, just to be watched until his parents could be located. But once at the police station, according to authorities, the student made a clumsy effort to escape, pushing an officer, garnering criminal charges, and ultimately influencing Harvey to make a bold, if disappointing, decision.

Dances this fall are canceled in Belmont. Harvey, a square-jawed wall of a man, said he had no choice but to take drastic measures. In doing so he joined a growing number of school administrators who are cracking down on the state's pervasive culture of underage drinking.

Following recent incidents at football games at Westwood High School and Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, administrators at those schools have not only suspended students but changed school policies, restricting what students can bring to games and even requiring them, on one occasion, to be accompanied by chaperones.

A growing number of high schools are now using breathalyzers at school events, testing students they believe to be intoxicated or sometimes testing every single student to make sure no one has been drinking. At Winchester High School dances, parents are required to sign in their students at the door. And many schools have adopted zero-tolerance policies.

If you're a senior at Woburn High School, for example, and you get caught drinking at the prom, you can forget about collecting your diploma on time.

"You're cooked for graduation," said Woburn High School principal Bob Norton, noting that violators must enroll in a counseling program that lasts about two months. "We don't put anybody on a fast track. If you get caught at senior prom, you don't graduate."

Even though Massachusetts' rates of underage drinking overall have fallen in recent years, state and local officials are troubled by what they're seeing. The state still has one of the highest rates of underage binge drinking in the country, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

In 2006, more than 11 percent of Massachusetts youths ages 12 to 17 reported binge drinking - defined as consuming five or more drinks in one sitting - during the prior month, according to the survey. For underage drinkers age 12 to 20, the rate was more than double: 23 percent. And the number of high school students reporting any drinking in the previous month, according to 2007 state data, is even higher.

"It's 46 percent," said Michael Botticelli, director of the state Bureau of Substance Abuse Services. "Forty-six percent of high school students have drunk alcohol in the past month. That's not reassuring data to me."

What's troubling, Botticelli said, is the impact that alcohol can have on a young person's life. Research has shown that adolescent alcohol use can have long-term effects on the brain and lead to higher rates of alcoholism. And according to a 2007 report from the US surgeon general, alcohol is a leading contributor to death from injuries - the main killer of people under 21. Annually, the surgeon general said, about 5,000 people under 21 die from alcohol-related injuries, including 1,900 in car crashes.

Such statistics often aren't persuasive enough to keep youths from drinking. But they're enough to keep parents up at night, wondering if their children will make it home safe. And the numbers - as well as the mounting incidents of drinking on school grounds in Massachusetts - are certainly getting the attention of administrators.

Last spring, after what happened at Belmont High's Hoedown, Harvey said he knew it was time to make a change.

"I was sitting there thinking, 'What am I doing here?' Really questioning why we do dances in general," he said.

"We've been very lucky that nobody's been seriously hurt, I think. We've had a lot of luck. And I don't want to be around when the luck runs out."

Concerned about underage drinking, high schools, including Newton, Wellesley, Westwood, and others, started turning to breathalyzers several years ago. A majority of high schools now use the devices in some way, according to Noel Pixley, president of the Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators' Association.

Principals say they just work.

"How many schools can tell you they've had 18 consecutive proms - junior and senior proms - and haven't had a single issue with any students in possession, any bottles, any kids smelling of booze? None?" said John Brucato, the principal of Milford High School who began using breathalyzers at school events nine years ago. "We just haven't had issues."

Such testimonials are just one reason why Reading Memorial High School is considering using breathalyzers. In the next month, principal Joe Finigan hopes to present a breathalyzer proposal to the School Committee. Other schools, meanwhile, are stiffening breathalyzer policies already in place.

Unhappy that more than a dozen students showed up drunk at the junior prom last spring, Whitman-Hanson Regional High School administrators, who already owned a breathalyzer to be used just in case, purchased more devices and will be testing every student who attends a dance.

"My feeling was if I could keep students from drinking alcohol until 11:30 or until the end of the program, they would be inherently safer for the rest of the evening," said Whitman-Hanson principal Ed Lee.

But some school administrators say breathalyzers - while legal to use in schools - offer a false sense of security. They can drive some students away from dances; that only means, critics argue, that students prone to drinking could be drunk elsewhere. And some school administrators are just philosophically opposed to using breathalyzers.

"If that's the route you go, you're kind of admitting defeat," said John Ritchie, the principal of Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, where alcohol tainted the school's first football game of the season this month, leaving at least one student hospitalized, four cited by police, and seven suspended.

"If that's all you're doing, you're not dealing with the problem. That's like saying, 'People in prison are well-behaved.' "

Ritchie hopes to convene a meeting of Lincoln-Sudbury's school council this week to discuss adopting stiffer penalties for alcohol use, including, possibly, banning violators from the prom and other dances for the rest of the year.

Action is necessary, he said, given what he has learned in recent weeks students at his school: Drinking is far more widespread than he ever knew; water bottles don't always contain water; and students have traditionally seen the first football game of the fall, as well as other occasions, as a chance to get "juiced up."

Ritchie said he is intent not just on cracking down, but on changing the school's culture. And with his cancellation of dances in Belmont, Harvey hopes to do the same. For years, Belmont High School students say, there's been a tradition of drinking at the school, at least among some.

"I don't drink personally," said junior soccer player Josh Nelson. "But if you come back after the weekend, on a Monday, you hear stories about parties that happened and what people did. And if parents aren't going to be home the next weekend, people start planning then. You hear it."

In the spring of 2005, five students had to be hospitalized after showing up drunk to a dance. Harvey, who became principal the following fall, soon enacted a policy requiring students to sign a pledge not to drink before dances - and that worked for a while, he said. But with the Hoedown last spring and the arrest of one student, whose charges were later dismissed, it became clear, Harvey said, that something more needed to be done.

News that Belmont will have only two dances this year - the semiformal in the winter and the prom next spring - shocked students when Harvey announced it this month. Katie Christensen, a junior, called it "a wake-up call." And though many students were disappointed, they also understood.

Senior class president Deana DiSalvio said she supports Harvey's decision. It's time for students to understand that they can't drink and expect that the tragedies will always happen to someone else, she said.

"Thank God "we haven't had an accident."

New opposition surfaces for lower drinking age

Not everyone is on board with the movement to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18.

An article in today's Washington Post indicates opposition has surface in Maryland:

With some of the nation's most prominent college leaders suggesting that the nation's drinking age be lowered, a group of researchers and safety experts told Maryland lawmakers yesterday that younger drinkers would bring more accidents and deaths.

The experts told members of a special House of Delegates committee on drug and alcohol abuse holding a hearing on underage drinking that not only should the drinking age remain 21, but that legislators should consider even tougher penalties for teenagers who break the law.

"The risk of a fatal crash increases with the first drink, especially for drivers aged 16 to 20," said James Fell, a senior program director at Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation.

Little U.S. data are available on the issue, because the drinking age has been 21 across the nation for more than two decades. Fell cited reports from New Zealand, where the drinking age was lowered from 20 to 18 in 1999 and where teenage crash injuries increased soon afterward.

Push for eighth grade algebra questioned

For the past several years, there has been a push to put as many students as possible into eighth grade algebra. While that push shows no signs of letting up, an article in today's Washington Post questions whether so many kids should be taking algebra at the eighth grade level:

Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has looked at the worst math students, those scoring in the bottom 10th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade test. He discovered that 28.6 percent of them -- let me make that clear: nearly three out of every 10 -- were enrolled in first-year algebra, geometry or second-year algebra. Almost all were grossly misplaced, probably because of the push to get kids into algebra sooner.

Canadian high school bans homework, calling it unfair

Undoubtedly many students would like to transfer to a Canadian high school where homework is banned, according to an article from parentcentral.ca:

Do students learn anything by completing 60 extra math problems at home?

Is it fair for kids from affluent families who have a computer at home – not to mention parental help – to work on assignments, while poorer kids might not have either?

Can teachers expect that children who live in shelters have a place to study?

One Ontario elementary school decided no, on all counts. So it banned homework.

"We send these projects home, and we don't know who's done them," said Jan Olson, principal at Prince of Wales Public School in Barrie, which draws students both affluent and indigent.

"And we don't know what the family life is like. We had a student, a girl who at 12 went home from school, took her siblings home and her mom was passed out on the floor.

"Her job was to make sure the younger ones didn't wake mom up. She had to feed them, she had to get them to bed, and the next day she's in detention because she didn't do her homework? That's where we are coming from with an inner-city school.

"We've got kids with a certain home life and we are making it worse by sending work home ... We have to accept the responsibility that we are perpetuating and extending the gap between the have and the have-nots."

Editorial: Homework is excessive

An editorial in today's Houston Post takes on the issue of whether homework is excessive and should be abolished:

Assigning lots of homework seems what rigorous schools are supposed to, several teachers and principals admit. But assigning hours and hours of busywork can backfire, depriving a child of the free time he needs to develop. To be useful, homework must build on concepts already taught in the classroom and efficiently show a teacher the child has mastered the material. The teacher also needs to read and grade the homework promptly.
Homework that is relentlessly dull, takes the place of classroom instruction or completely devours a child's personal time thwarts mental development rather than enriching it.
Pro forma busywork can rob children of the sleep they need, and the essential unstructured time necessary for recreational reading, creativity and building relationship skills.
Nevertheless, a moderate amount of meaningful homework, about two hours a night for high schoolers, helps students practice what they've learned in school and prods their intellectual curiosity, say educators, including Mike Feinberg, co-founder of Houston's Knowledge is Power Program charter school.
It also might reinforce time management skills. Especially in low-income families with parents at work and few neighborhood resources, attending to homework cuts into the number of hours spent dully staring at television. That's no small educational benefit.
Splitting the difference, with what experts calls the 10 minute rule — 10 minutes per grade per year, starting with second grade — is a sane rule-of-thumb.
But even that shouldn't be blindly followed without scrutinizing what teachers assign and measuring its success. Our students' minds are too precious to be fed empty calories.

Girl with pink hair allowed to return to school

The Mountain Home seventh grader who was suspended from school for dying her hair pink to honor her father who died of cancer has returned to school, according to an article in today's Springfield News-Leader:

Amelia Robbins, a student at Mountain Grove Middle School, returned to classes Monday, after the school district relented, Springfield television station KYTV reported. The 12-year-old had been suspended just days after classes began Aug. 13.

Amelia has said she dyed her hair pink to honor her father, who died of cancer when she was 6.

The reversal came after an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union office in St. Louis wrote to the district last week arguing that students have a protected right to express themselves.

Amelia finished sixth grade at the same school with pink streaks in her hair.

She said school administrators warned her not to continue wearing the color, but -- with her mother's permission -- she dyed her hair entirely pink over the summer.

Girl suspended for wearing pink hair as a tribute to her dead father

A Mountain Grove, Mo., seventh grader has been suspended from school for wearing pink hair as a tribute to her dead father. From Associated Press:

A southern Missouri school district has suspended a pink-haired seventh-grader.

Mountain Grove Middle School student Amelia Robbins said she dyed her hair pink to honor her father, who died of cancer when she was 6 years old. She says that to her, pink is the cancer color.


The 12-year-old said that when she finished 6th grade with pink streaks in her hair, school administrators warned her not to continue wearing the color. But with her mother's permission, Amelia dyed all of her hair pink, and her school year ground to a halt just days after it started.

She doesn't think her hair color is a distraction.

The school handbook says administrators have the authority to decide whether a student is causing a distraction. Officials declined to discuss specifics of Amelia's case.

(KY3 Photo)

Texas school district to allow teachers to carry guns to deter school shooting

A Texas school district has come up with a novel idea to prevent school shootings. Teachers will be allowed to carry firearms in the classroom:

HARROLD, Texas (AP) -- A tiny Texas school district will allow teachers and staff members to carry concealed firearms to protect against school shootings, provided the gun-toting employees follow certain requirements.

The small community of Harrold in north Texas is a 30-minute drive from the Wilbarger County Sheriff's Office, leaving students and teachers without protection, said David Thweatt, superintendent of the Harrold Independent School District. The lone campus of the 110-student district sits near a heavily traveled highway, which could make it a target, he argued.

"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog," Thweatt said in a story published Friday on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Web site.

Barbara Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Association of School Boards, said her organization did not know of another district with such a policy. Ken Trump, a Cleveland, Ohio-based school security expert who advises districts nationwide, said Harrold is the first district with such a policy.

Trustees approved the policy change last year, and it takes effect when classes begin this month. For employees to carry a pistol, they must have a Texas license to carry a concealed handgun, must be authorized to carry by the district, must receive training in crisis management and hostile situations and must use ammunition designed to minimize the risk of ricocheting bullets.

Officials researched the policy and considered other options for about a year before approving the policy change, Thweatt said. The district also has other measures in place to prevent a school shooting, he said.

"The naysayers think [a shooting] won't happen here. If something were to happen here, I'd much rather be calling a parent to tell them that their child is OK because we were able to protect them," Thweatt said.

Texas law outlaws firearms at schools unless specific institutions allow them.

It isn't clear how many of the 50 or so teachers and staff members will be armed this fall, because Thweatt did not disclose that information, to keep it from students or potential attackers.

Link provided to podcast of Mitch Albom show discussion on teachers and MySpace

I just discovered a podcast of my interview with guest host Steve Courtney on WJR Radio in Detroit's Mitch Albom Show.

The discussion centered around the topic of teachers communicating with their students via MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites.