Schools Are Helping Police Spy On Kids' Social Media Activity (orlandosentinel.com) 215
schwit1 shares this excerpt from an article in The Washington Post: Schools in Florida are renewing a program that monitors their students' social media activity for criminal or threatening behavior, although it has caused some controversy since its adoption last year. The school system in Orange County, where Orlando is located, recently told the Orlando Sentinel that the program, which partners the school system with local police departments, has been successful in protecting students' safety, saying that it led to 12 police investigations in the past year. The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends, the monitoring software used to check students' activity. It's the same software used by police in Racine, Wisconsin, to track criminal activity and joins a slew of similar social media monitoring software used by law enforcement to keep an eye on the community.
SnapTrends collects data from public posts on students' social media accounts by scanning for keywords that signify cases of cyberbullying, suicide threats, or criminal activity. School security staff then comb through flagged posts and alert police when they see fit.
SnapTrends collects data from public posts on students' social media accounts by scanning for keywords that signify cases of cyberbullying, suicide threats, or criminal activity. School security staff then comb through flagged posts and alert police when they see fit.
So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
Is this any different to kids saying stuff out loud in the real world, being overheard, and someone reporting it to the authorities?
Now, if it was PRIVATE posts, holy crap I've have an issue with that. That would be no different to installing microphones on the kids and recording private conversations in their homes.
The school district will pay about $18k annually (Score:5, Interesting)
The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends
I guess this is really a great thing since the school district has all that excess money that they can't find a use for.
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True, but if your goal is to change where the money goes, that isn't the place to start... :)
I fully support hiring more teachers and reducing class sizes, providing them with the tools to do their jobs.
Of course, I also support being able to fire teachers that can't cut the mustard.
Make schools compete for business (Score:4, Informative)
The per-pupil costs of public schools has quadrupled since the 1960-ies [ed.gov] (inflation-adjusted), while the education quality remains the target of well-deserved mockery.
What competing service-provider could possibly afford to quadruple their prices without any observable improvement in quality?
The solution is to end the monopoly of the public school system (and the teachers' unions, that control their staff)...
Re:Make schools compete for business (Score:4, Insightful)
Differently than teachers, the salaries of school and school district administrators have risen tremendously. And from the administration, you get all the talk about how teachers' unions would cause higher education costs. If you load your schools with more and more administrative tasks, be it constant evaluations of pupils, of teachers or both, or be it a thorough documentation of about anything and constant reports to be filed, you raise costs. And you get yourself an expensive adminstrative monster and rising education costs.
If you had the same type of school than in the 1960ies, where blackboard, chalk and quad paper are the only teaching tools, without any laboratories, libraries, beamers or any type of technical infrastructure, at the housing prices of 1960 and without all that administrative overhead of today, you suddenly would notice a significant drop in education cost.
Re:Make schools compete for business (Score:5, Insightful)
I attended first grade in 1958. All the schools I attended had well stocked libraries, musical facilities, art materials, gymnasiums and sports equipment. High school had labs. We had shop classes with tools. We had videotapes in 1963.
Just because there were no computers doesn't mean there was no technology.
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Alas a lot of administrative costs come out of programs required as a result of parents filing lawsuits for various reasons. The merits of those programs - well that depends on the point of view of course, but they all are started on the road of good intentions.
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Another thing to consider is what we do with students with learning disabilities and other problems. Back when I was a kid, we didn't know very much about such things, and the students simply did badly. How much to individualize education for people with some sort of disability is a difficult question, since special accommodations cost money.
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You might want to learn how pension funds are paid for before spouting off.
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The public school system has no monopoly, whose lies have you been listening to, fool?. Private schools exist, but are unaffordable to most, with the exception of religious schools. Home schooling also competes with public schools. They simply can't compete despite the terrible job public schools do.
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There are some private schools out there and lots of home schooling, so the word monopoly in the OP is too strong. However, It's economically difficult to compete when the government gives away a version of your product for free at 100% loss while taking your profits to pay for it. If the government gave everyone "Payless" level shoes for free, the market for shoes from Walmart would be nonexistent and the market for nicer shoes would also be much smaller... limited to people who re
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union busting?
I can't support that. not ever. given what we see of the GREED of corps, the concept of a union makes so much sense, that, without it, you become SLAVES to the industry.
ask me, I know. I'm in software. we have no unions. and I've been out of work for months and months (in the past, even years at a time). there is no one to speak for me; and unions would have helped at least balance the power that the megacorps have.
no, its never a good idea to get rid of unions. corps are selfish pricks
OT: Unions are racketeers (Score:2)
Unions are organizations, which openly and blatantly work coordinate to maintain and raise the prices of what their members are selling — their labor. Their official goals are to have 100% of each profession belong to their respective union so that no employer — a buyer of labor — would be able to buy from any other supplier. Cartels — or wanna-be cartels.
When goods-manufacturers or service-providers try the same collusion [wikipedia.org] with each other, we
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"Wont go past step 1 as all the property owners all just went apeshit at the thought of raising taxes."
There ya go. Fixed that for you. Unless you meant only Republicans own property?
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Please link to examples where any major public school system has improved objectively measured metrics by throwing more money at the problem. I'm all for better schools, but I've seen way too much waste.
Re: The school district will pay about $18k annual (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. If kids learn critical thinking and have all the facts they turn out conservative. When they don't have the facts, they turn more liberal and later when they get older and wiser become more conservative. Why would the right wing be opposed to that?
The problem with bad teachers is that the kids aren't learning much of anything. It really is no more complicated than that.
Except for the fact that the well educated parts of the US consistently turn out more liberal people, well educated countries turn out more liberal people, and liberalism in general is much more flexible with new information that conservatism.
I'm not here to debate the two, but liberalism vs conservatism usually comes down to a matter of mental flexibility. Places which are conservative (the plain states, the south) are usually poorer states with fewer people, many of whom live in isolation. They become much less comfortable dealing with new information or ideas, and old people in general have problems with that as they advance in age.
You can debate which one is better, but saying that conservatism comes with knowing all the facts or with quality education is almost completely wrong, as the complete opposite is usually true.
Re: The school district will pay about $18k annual (Score:5, Insightful)
All of this conversation is pointless if you cannot define liberal or conservative. In US culture they aren't really ideals so much as they are pre-packaged bundles of positions that conveniently align with one of the major parties. That's why you find a strong correlation between people's position on, say, gun control and gay marriage even though there is absolutely nothing to relate these issues. American political culture forces people to pick a side and stick with it.
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https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
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The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends
I guess this is really a great thing since the school district has all that excess money that they can't find a use for.
Seriously, is not it wonderful, the schools finally do not need to hold a bake-sale to get the money they need [brainyquote.com]?
Ah, and perfect timing too — because schools are no longer allowed [babble.com] to hold bake-sales.
Rich school districts have plenty of money (Score:2)
Re:The school district will pay about $18k annuall (Score:4, Insightful)
The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends
I guess this is really a great thing since the school district has all that excess money that they can't find a use for.
This is for a school system (orange county) with a budget of over 1.5 billion. And if 1.5 billion sounds excessive for a school system budget, consider that this school system has 190,000 students, so that works out to less than $7900 per student (average for the US is about $12000). That paints a picture of a pretty bare-bones school system, but amortized over the entire student body that $18,000 works out to less than a dime per student, so nobody is losing access to AP courses (or football) over that particular purchase.
Supposing that monitoring student social media use for cyberbullying is a good idea, it seems to me that $18,000 is a bargain compared to paying humans to sift through the postings from all the students in the 18 high schools and 32 middle schools in the district. There may be reasons to object to this, but expense isn't one of them.
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But... (Score:2)
$18k per year is a lot cheaper than paying out zillions for stuff a court says they "should have done better with."
Re:The school district will pay about $18k annuall (Score:5, Insightful)
A Big "BullShit"!
The school has a responsibility to protect students while they are on school grounds, inside school buildings and at school events.
If they "ride the bus", the school has a responsibility to provide safe and appropriate transportation.
. Period!
The school has no responsibility past the schoolyard boundary.
If you think otherwise, then you have given up the right to have and rear your own children.
This is Hill C.'s "It takes a [Federal] village" to raise a child.
Re:The school district will pay about $18k annuall (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring whether or not your assertion is correct, unfortunately the end result is prosecuting students (perhaps over actions normally deeemed 1st amendment protected), not protecting them.
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First Amendment is all about free speech. Talking about committing a crime online leads to arrest for the crime, not the speech. I'm amazed sometimes what idiots admit to doing while blabbing on facebook. Some people even provide videos of themselves in the act of breaking the law. Frankly I think they're too stupid to be allowed to roam free putting their fellow citizens at risk.
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That's only true if you assume that the crime one is talking about has been committed in the first place!
But we have arrived in a place where dis- and reassembling a clock in a makeshift case gets you arrested for a bomb scare, which is treated as terrorism, and stupid but harmless jokes on facebook lead to having your home swatted. (And who cares if dogs or your kids get shot - hey, it's your own fault)
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until the feds starting burying schools in mandates and rules... it's ALL about indoctrination and intimidation
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It doesn't have an absolute responsibility to protect students. It doesn't have a responsibility to protect them from things that occur outside school hours and off school premises.
Re:The school district will pay about $18k annuall (Score:5, Interesting)
I would also add that kids have to learn that anything that is done on a school network or computer is not private.
If they were monitoring the school networks and computers, that would be one thing, but this goes far beyond that. That software is designed to monitor the public social media feeds of the students outside of school. This by itself is not what I object to. After all, some school officials and some parents are probably doing some of that monitoring already, and since these are public posts, it's not like students can complain.
What I am concerned with however is that school staff are rarely a neutral party when it comes the speech of their students. Because let's not fool ourselves, the primary reason school officials are searching through social media posts is to look for their own names first, the second thing they look for are videos of themselves (just in case a student recorded them losing it in front of students), and the third thing they look for is anything that might paint their school in a potential negative light. And of course, I am sure that cyberbullying, suicide signs, and other warning signs, are things that they'll look for as well, but in my opinion that's a distant 4th, 5th, and 6th priority for them.
And so if the school is going to spend 18k a year on this stuff, I don't think they should be the ones doing it. They're not capable of being impartial observers. And if a dean really wants to monitor his own/her own reputation online, he/she should be doing it on her own dime and outside of working hours. And as to the safety issue, I do believe that parents, other kids, the general public, tattle tales, and law enforcement authorities, are still going to be the best and quickest sources of information when something bad publicly crops up on the internet.
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you nailed it.
schools are looking for mention of themselves, their teachers and admins.
just like UC Davis and the infamous "sergent pepper-spray" event (https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/04/15/042217/uc-davis-spent-175000-to-bury-search-results-after-cops-pepper-sprayed-protestors), the school ONLY CARES ABOUT ITSELF.
Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Our public school district here simply sends the kids home with iPads with pre-installed spyware. I've even seen the camera light turn on out of the blue. The new rule is when my little girl isn't doing homework, the hard cover is put on it and it gets stuffed in the bookbag. And she's not to do any web browsing on it that isn't school related.
For her personal stuff she has a desktop PC and an Asus Transformer. This is actually an interesting life lesson. It's good to treat work-issued devices as spy hardware and not put personal things on them when she grows up as well.
I'd just tell the school where to shove their iPad but if she doesn't use it they issue twice as much written homework and make it harder for her to participate in class. What I'd like to know is why the school system thinks they have a right to spy on my child after school hours.
Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
If the camera light has come on then it is time to accuse the district of kiddie porn. With the current environment, the burden of proof will be on them and with, at least, one district having already been nailed on this issue, it will likely lead to policy changes. The camera on the device, in this context, is supposed to be used only to locate the device if it is reported stolen. If they are capturing pictures of someone under the age of 18 using the device, then there can only be one purpose, at least as far as the public is concerned.
Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Our public school district here simply sends the kids home with iPads with pre-installed spyware. I've even seen the camera light turn on out of the blue.
BS. iPads don't have camera lights. Stop making things up.
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Just remember, Microsoft gave the NFL a ton of Surface tablets and the announcers and media kept calling them "iPads". Welcome top the world of Kleenex and BandAid, and KoolAid.
People refer to the category product by a brand name...
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It's good to treat work-issued devices as spy hardware and not put personal things on them when she grows up as well.
That's a lesson worth learning for other reasons. Often your work wants to blur the line between what's their device and what's your device. Why? Because if your personal life is entwined on the same device as your work life, then suddenly you're never not at work.
Keep these things separate. Do not install your work life onto your device, any more than you'd install your personal life onto theirs.
Unless you are your own boss, of course. Then you can please yourself.
Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
Is this any different to kids saying stuff out loud in the real world, being overheard, and someone reporting it to the authorities?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu
Kids threatening other kids out loud is one thing. Scouring through their internet posts to find something with which you can incriminate them is another thing entirely. It's like the difference between a cop seeing you doing something illegal outside, and the police being able to track you with security footage to see if there is anything they can charge you with.
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It's like the difference between a cop seeing you doing something illegal outside, and the police being able to track you with security footage to see if there is anything they can charge you with.
Don't go to London then...
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I've already commented on this story so I can't mod you up...
Re: So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:2)
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Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:4)
Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
The problem is that SnapTrends passes on the posts to school security, and school security passes on the posts to the police.
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer, and they may not even have a right to remain silent.
Police are skilled at manipulating adults, to say nothing of children, into false confessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and the school police have been prosecuting normal childhood behavior as crimes.
As Slashdot readers could guess, they prosecute minority children disproportionately http://njdc.info/wp-content/up... [njdc.info]
Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Not legally.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer
Yes they do. They also have a right to demand that their parents be present during questioning.
The problem here is not the rights, but knowledge of those rights. If you have teenage kids, you need to teach them their legal rights. Have them watch the Do Not Talk to the Police video [youtube.com]. If you kid is questioned by the police, they should be trained to say exactly four words:
1. I
2. Want
3. My
4. Parents
Once they say those four words, the police are legally obligated to stop questioning them until their parents are present.
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Re:So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:4, Interesting)
I would like to be living in the world that you believe exists.
In many of the cases in news reports of student disciplinary actions that led to criminal charges, students were not allowed to contact their parents, were not informed of the right to have a lawyer, and in fact didn't have a right to a lawyer.
That's true even for college students. https://www.thefire.org/fire-g... [thefire.org]
There was a court ruling in North Carolina which gave high school students limited constitutional rights in disciplinary hearings. http://tharringtonsmith.com/st... [tharringtonsmith.com] The significant points are (1) Up to that case, they didn't have constitutional rights (2) That case only applies in North Carolina (3) The rights are still limited. Students still don't have a right to a lawyer at most parts of the disciplinary process.
If you want to look it up, Emily Yoffe was writing in Slate about sex abuse charges. In one case, a student got a Skype call over the summer about an accusation he knew nothing about. It was basically an ambush hearing. He said that he thought that he should get a lawyer first. The university official running the hearing said that if he didn't participate in the hearing, they would make their decision without his input.
Re: So long as it is PUBLIC posts... meh... (Score:2)
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Thank you for your useful advice. I will fix my laws immediately.
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I'm serious. You should be lobbying for local, state, and federal bodies to include the extra safeguards that a child would be expected to need vs. an adult.
It's how you preserve rights ... which both libertarians and right-wing evangelicals are so eager to do away with (not that they have an exclusive monopoly on this).
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My Senator was Hillary Clinton, and as you may have noticed the best way to lobby her is to hold a fund-raising dinner to collect $100,000 or so in campaign contributions. Unfortunately I don't travel in those circles so that avenue is not open to me. During the campaign, a black student confronted Clinton on her "super-predators" speech, and the student got to Clinton by paying $500 to attend a fund-raising dinner. That's what it takes.
(My current Senator, Kristen Gillibrand, is not much better, and as for
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All part of the School to Prison Pipeline (Score:3)
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
The problem is that SnapTrends passes on the posts to school security, and school security passes on the posts to the police.
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer, and they may not even have a right to remain silent.
Police are skilled at manipulating adults, to say nothing of children, into false confessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and the school police have been prosecuting normal childhood behavior as crimes.
As Slashdot readers could guess, they prosecute minority children disproportionately http://njdc.info/wp-content/up... [njdc.info]
Example in point: Lazy "undercover cop" has a secret drug sting and nabs an Autistic student who likely has no idea what's going on: http://www.dailykos.com/story/... [dailykos.com]
Shit like this happens all the time - only in extreme cases like this (the school district tried to expel student after he graduated - only to ruin the student's life) where the situation is pretty clear, and the parents are super-engaged to fight does it come out in the light.
All part of the job for corrupt school administrators, cops, and ev
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"Answer the questions Johnny or you'll be (expelled/suspended/anything-else-they-can-come-up-with) immediately!"
Also remember that police may knowingly outright lie to you, but any small detail of anything you say that's proven not 100% accurate, true, & factual is an arrestable and chargeable offense.
"When did you make this post?" "Uhh, 9:15pm." "The logs show it was actually 9:19pm. Yo
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I'm not going to say that stuff doesn't happen because I know it does but it's not the norm. The vast majority of the time they just try to scare the shit out of them to get them to take things seriously. Almost always the charges get dropped once they get the child and his/her parent's attention. I will say I think the old days where they beat their asses ( and mine got beat a few times ) was better. Now instead of a sore bottom that healed in a few days they end up with legal fees and often a trip to
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I didn't get many spankings but they were real spankings, not a swat on the rear. They hurt and left marks and I could not go home and complain because if I did the one my Dad would have given me would have been even worse. I was raised in an era where children were expected to do what they were told without question. The smart kids either didn't get caught or they learned to behave.
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I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
The bad argument: "Abloobloo technology back in my day rabble rabble luddite fucksticks."
The good argument: Schools shouldn't be wasting time or money on this bullshit. Property taxes, funneled to schools, should be going to education, not doing cops fucking jobs for them.
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Mind you: they are all most likely legally alowed (depends on the country). However they are not all moral. To me teaching kids is about doing the moral thing, so them asking the police to watch over them in this way is extremely wrong. Legal, but wrong.
Fair enough, but keep in mind that the "moral thing" is simply your opinion. If that opinion becomes the majority, you can enshrine it into law.
Just because something isn't "moral" from your point of view doesn't mean we should all make it illegal.
Private does mean (in Europe) your person and even when you are outside you have rights to privacy.
Tell that to the paparazzi and Princess Diana... :)
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The problem is that they are children. They do not yet understand the full legal and social ramifications of posting online in a public forum under their real name, and also have not fully developed higher-order reasoning skills. They may not understand that they are being watched like this. Couple this with the fact that the record of any investigation will remain in a police database for the rest of their lives, and these children are essentially facing consequences for actions which they do not fully und
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There is a natural expectation of some privacy, even in public places.
While I tend to agree with you, the government feels otherwise.
http://www.wired.com/2010/09/p... [wired.com]
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There may be no right to privacy in public places currently. There is, however, I would argue, a natural expectation of it.
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Still though, I cannot agree with the wholesale monitoring of the public discussions of schoolchildren.
You DO know the NSA monitors all of us, right? We have built a government full of "monitoring", and amazingly enough, millions of people are ok with this.
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Indeed, I do know that. However, I disagree with the practice regardless.
Don't the schools have enough to do ? (Score:2)
Apparently providing a substandard education isn't enough to do for the schools in Florida, they need other tasks to really screw up to keep them busy.
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You're assuming that the goals of the policy-makers in Florida is to provide an quality education to children. If the goal is to syphon off as much public money from them to line their own pockets, then the good money is prepping them for prison so they can continue it right into adulthood. If that is their goal, then everything is working perfectly. Raise them with a crappy education so that crime is a more enticing option, spy on them the whole time and report every action to the police so that they ca
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
What could possibly go wrong when amateur sleuths with spare time decided to look for incriminating evidence in everyday speech and activities?
I'm sure they'll find lots of things to report to the police which the police will take seriously and investigate - completely screwing up children's lives by criminalising them.
I just hope the children don't slip up on Facebook privacy settings so the school can't see what they're posting.
This is, of course, teaching the children to be fearful and to hide from arbitrary, vengeful authority. Bad for their mental health - but realistic training for life in the USA today.
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I just hope the children don't slip up on Facebook privacy settings so the school can't see what they're posting.
This is why my kids aren't on social media and likely won't be until they are old enough to drive, and even then, maybe...
If we could see what Trump and Clinton were posting back when they were 16 years old... well... lets just say I have no idea how ANYONE will be electable in 50 years, given the record...
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This is why my kids aren't on social media and likely won't be until they are old enough to drive, and even then, maybe...
Are you sure ? Kids can be pretty sneaky and there is a strong desire to be part of the heard even if that's not how they see it.
Anyway, aren't there security settings that prevent non-friends or friends-of-friends seeing your Social Media prattle?
My Facebook is locked down tightly, and no one from work or remotely related to work is on my friend list, I mostly prattle on inanely about my favorite cat videos with high school and college friends that live thousands of miles away...
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Are you sure ? Kids can be pretty sneaky and there is a strong desire to be part of the heard even if that's not how they see it.
Well, my youngest is 5 and my oldest is 10...
I also have Parent controls on the computer with monitoring of everything they do, and the computers they can use are in the family room where everyone can see them.
So yes, reasonably sure.
Web access is white list only to the specific stuff needed for school. My own logins are password protected on everything.
Anyway, aren't there security settings that prevent non-friends or friends-of-friends seeing your Social Media prattle?
I'm not even on social media, I think the whole thing is rather stupid, but then if I want to hang out with someone, I foolishly do it in the real world. :
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the big porblem with "private" postings is very very simple
1 Facebook has an office setup to deal with LEO requests and all it would take is a short convo for FB to start setting aside data from an account
2 https://www.facebook.com/safet... [facebook.com] ----- as long as there is a Court Order exactly NOTHING is kept from a LEO request [ panic delete your account hope you do it BEFORE a LEO has submitted a data request]
3 and that is the WRITTEN policy whatcha wanna bet that this is not the effective policy at all times??
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A minor on school property/using school property doesn't have the same expectation of privacy that an adult on private property does, but what worries me is the potential for false positives from things being taken out of context, and the potential for something inappropriate but small scale to get escalated to a point where more harm than good is done.
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Of course YOUR kids are perfect in every way and have NEVER made any mistakes WHATSOEVER, right?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Nothing new (Score:4, Informative)
Preview is indeed your edit button.
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked in a couple of school districts, I can tell you that a lot of administrators are former high school bullies that grew up to be gym teachers and right on into administration. The behavior of sparing no time or expense tracking down and punishing students that made fun of them on the internet fits the profile of a grown-up bully perfectly.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you remember the case of the school calling the cops claiming a terrorist threat for a kid with an open suitcase and a digital clock?
But I'm sure schools in a classy state like Florida would never make a mistake like that.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
But. The clock/kid/suitcase thing was a setup, and the school allowed the alleged bomb to sit there for the entire class, so even the educators you could normally refer to accurately as mentally stunted didn't actually overreact.
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Missing the point, as usual... (Score:2)
Of course, this whole plan misses the point... Rather than try and address the CAUSE of these problems, they are treating the SYMPTOM instead...
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Why is there bullying? Threats? Etc? I know that some of that might always exist, but when I was in school, the school itself did a lot to divide up the kids into groups and make some feel less than others.
Pep rally Friday always sucked, that is when the jocks and the cheerleaders came to school in their uniforms and got to show off to the school and have the
Absolutely (Score:2)
Can you explain to my why it is "cool" to dunk the ball and then celebrate your accomplishment but get a perfect score and everyone looks down on you for ruining the curve? Try being openly happy proud about that perfect score and you will get a lecture from a school official about humility. Go figure.
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Rather than try and address the CAUSE of these problems, they are treating the SYMPTOM instead...
In their defense, they need to know the symptoms before they can treat the cause. You try walking into your doctor's office and say, "I feel fine" and then wonder why he didn't find the cancer in your pancreas.
Pep rally Friday always sucked, that is when the jocks and the cheerleaders came to school in their uniforms and got to show off to the school and have their achievements broadcast over the speakers. Did the science team or chess team ever get that? Hell no.
Aww...po' widdwe baboo! "Nobody recognizes my unique gifts and talents and it's just not fair!"
Back in high school, I wasn't much of an athlete--like you, I spent most of my time in the computer lab at the local college. But just because I wasn't a good athlete, I didn't whine because nobody patted
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I think you're missing the point. Being, why is so much time and money and appreciation lavished on the "dumb jocks" and why are the smart kids discouraged from showing the same amount of enthusiasm for their accomplishments? It promotes stupidity over knowledge and intellect, hence, accelerating the downward trend in the education system in the USA.
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And to think, you're still butthurt about it.
And to think, you completely missed the point...
Grow the fuck up. It's high school. It doesn't matter anymore.
A small percentage of those kids don't get to "grow up", because they are dead. Either from being shot, or doing the shooting.
So it matters to them.
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Or are you ok if we go and bully gay kids because, "it is high school and they'll get over it?" Because that is what you're saying.
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It's high school. It doesn't matter anymore.
In fairness, that does make it relevant to the topic.
Young folks will learn about security (Score:4, Insightful)
So the STASI has arrived in the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
And Americans are tought from a young age to keep their mouth shut when they might want to voice opinions that their masters don't like. At least Putin has more sense of humor than the kind of teachers implementing things like that.
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Living in a Police State (Score:4, Informative)
WTF are people thinking, doing such things?
Thanks to fools who accept this sort of behavior we are now officially living in a police state.
There should be criminal, legislative and civil investigations, and the whole bunch of people involved rounded up, prosecuted and thrown in the slammer.
Hmmmm (Score:2)
Sounds like profiling...
Schools have neither the right nor the authority (Score:2)
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And previously we assumed, neither the funding...
Idiots' do not know what to measure (Score:2)
The number of investigations is irrelevant - the number of CONVICTIONS is relevant.
Any cop can decide to investigate for zero reason. J.E. Hoover routinely investigated people like the Beatles and MLK Jr. Investigations means the cop is not being lazy, it doesn't mean the source is worthwhile.
You want to demonstrate the validity of the source, you need convictions, not investigations.
Not New (Score:2)
About 10 years ago, some company that had provided "one laptop per child" were caught recording videos of mutual masturbation between way-under-aged teens.
Such industries attracts pedos, just like clergy, juvenile prisons, homes for deaf boys, and so on.
Those of us who saw this coming. . . We kept our mouths shut, for Cassandras are punished, rather than thanked.
And so history repeats itself.
Why does the school have acct info in 1st place? (Score:2)
The first question is WHY does the school even have the students' social media account info in the first place? Why are they going out into the online world to track the students outside of school? That's like the principle showing up at my kids' birthday party to see what they're saying to each other about the kids that weren't invited... it's not their job to police that, and they should be bitch slapped for even going there.
The only exception I can think of is them monitoring social media posts that are
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Or learn how to fight it.
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