The school has turned off the monitoring program and students, taking no chances, have taped over the webcams and the microphones. The FBI will investigate to see if the school broke federal law.

Michael and Holly Robbins of Penn Valley, Pa., filed the lawsuit. In their lawsuit, they asked the judge “to issue a restraining order preventing the district from remotely activating the webcams on student notebooks. They also requested that the judge block the district from recalling the laptops from students, saying that they believe school officials will then wipe the MacBooks’ hard drives to delete evidence of any camera activation.”

The school has since admitted to using the cameras and microphones to located missing laptops. However, the parents claimed the laptop was not reported missing at the time.

On the TV Program The Early Show, the student said the principal accused him of selling drugs and taking pills. So now there’s  a motive for the principal.

It’s no surprise that an official with such control over students would try to grab more control by monitoring students at home. If the state can take someone’s children for eight hours a day, I guess these officials figured camera monitoring was less offensive – which it is.

Faced with losing their Orwellian surveillance device, the school is probably going to ask the state government to proceed to the next logical step of forced schooling and require students to become full-time boarders at the school. Or maybe take an intermediate step and require students to stay at the school/prison until 9 or 10 p.m., at least until the local curfew kicks in.

Read a Computer World article.

Read a CBS News article.

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The parents specifically filed a federal lawsuit stating the district stifled their children’s First Amendment free speech rights. According to Fox News, the parents also sued to repeal the uniform policy.

One of the students had worn a button for more than six weeks before the school protested. The school claimed the buttons promoted Nazi ideology and do not, if you can believe this, constitute free speech. While the lawsuit moved forward, the students did not wear buttons to avoid jeopardizing their education.

“The school cannot prohibit student free speech even where some may find the speech offensive,” said Ed Barocas, legal director of the ACLU’s New Jersey chapter. “The school must show that the free speech is actually going to be disruptive, in order to censor it.”

The parents issued a written statement:

“I’ve gotten overwhelming support from MANY people that tell me that they absolutely agree with what the image depicted, an ominously homogenous group of blindly cooperative children,” the statement said.

“That image showed no swastikas, no weapons, and Hitler himself wasn’t depicted,” she wrote. “The picture makes a profound statement about what can happen when we turn children into ‘uniform’ followers. Our intent was not to offend but to make a bold statement about what we, as an American family believe is an erosion of a simple right, to be individuals, not blind followers. The very basic rights, to wear clothing we choose, and to peacefully protest what we know was the undemocratic stripping of those rights from us as parent and student.”

Wow!

More info:

• First Amendment Center
• NY Times Article (with photo of student wearing button!)
• Hey Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
• Find Michael DePinto on Facebook.

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In late January, they finally caved to protests, and opened one bathroom for all of us to use, which is still closed every so often for no apparent reason. Now, the school is laid out as three hallways, one on each floor, with the girl’s rooms at one end and the men’s rooms at the other. They one they opened in the one next to the foyer, far from most classrooms. If I were to leave my third floor spanish class to use the bathroom, it would take me ten minutes to get down there and wait in the line, and another five minutes to walk back up. The administration dictates that only one student may be absent from the class at a time, so we have, at most, three chances each class to go.

In addition, they have installed cameras monitoring that men’s room. It’s rather uncomftorable to be using a urinal and staring into a glossy black lens.

And then we have prom…

Before Junior prom, they threatened the entire junior class (I was not there to see this, as I am not a junior) with not having a senior prom next year if there was any “dirty” dancing. They didn’t specify what that meant exactly. I went to that prom because my girlfriend is a junior. The DJ played only songs that would cause dirty dancing and more or less encouraged it. Two of the younger teachers who are married were grinding in the middle of the crowd. Most of the students there didn’t do any dirty dancing. The prom as a whole was rather clean. No one showed up drunk, no one got into fights. I still had to submit myself to being breathalyzed, and no one was allowed to leave before 11:00 (which was a real pain for me, because I had to drop my date off an hour away, then drive an hour and a quarter back home), but we all had a good, clean time. I’ve seen a lot worse.

The monday after, they call all the seniors together and inform us of the “new rules” regarding our prom.

• No dancing other than “ballroom dancing” will be allowed, violators will be ejected.
• No one may come in a group or in pairs, no one may come in a limo. We must be dropped off and picked up by our parents (most of us are 18+. One guy is almost 20), on penalty of suspension.
• We will have, instead of one of our classes, mandatory ballroom dancing classes (in a condemmed part of the building, no less), but yet we have to make up all our work.
• If we don’t show up for prom, and we are registered for it, they call our parents and the cops (They did this to the sophomores at their semi. It got ugly.)
• Any voilation by a senior means we won’t walk the stage at graduation.

So, instead, we’re renting out an 18+ club which happens to be a block away from prom, and partying there. I believe there are only 12 people registered for prom so far.

Thank you for your wonderful website. I’ve been a registered libertarian for 1 year and 4 months now, and I’m proud to be one. I am also a lifetime member of the NRA and ACLU. Most of the people I know at my school are the same way, and many of the people I know outside of my school. There’s hope yet.

Update (six months later):

We held the prom for less than what it would have cost of the school had run it, and we did what we felt like doing. There were no problems or anything, as we expected. It was great.

Commentary:

Great job on privatizing your prom. It’s unclear why schools have proms anyway. Should they throw a group sweet sixteen as well? Will college prep courses soon be having proms as well?

The bathroom story is horrible. We recently wrote about school admins who thought purple hair was a distraction. Needing a bathroom break is a distraction. Like the hair dye story, schools present the opposite of a normal world. Once students graduate and work for a living, they will be allowed to have purple hair and go to the bathroom without asking.

Send us your story.

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