Schools Scanned Students' Irises Without Permission 342
schwit1 writes "Parents in Polk County, Florida are outraged after learning that students in area schools had their irises scanned as part of a new security program without obtaining proper permission. Two days before their Memorial Day weekend break, kids from at least three different public schools — Bethune Academy (K–5), Davenport School of the Arts (K–5, middle, and high school), and Daniel Jenkins Academy (grades 6–12) — were subjected to iris scans without their parents' knowledge or consent. The scans are essentially optical fingerprints, which the school intended to collect to create a database of biometric information for school-bus security."
s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll lose both, and deserve neither.
Re:s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll lose both, and deserve neither.
The dead horse is starting to stink. keep beating, though, if it makes you happy.
We are a police state in the US now. The excuses are terrorism, drugs, child porn, whatever - and there's a loud minority of people who want that shit and a silent majority who just grumble on the rare occasions when it bothers them - like having their nail file being confiscated at the TSA checkpoint.
Those of us who saw it coming have lost. There is nothing to do now except wait for the day that it gets so bad - if ever - that regular people start pressuring their politicians to put the cat back in the bag. I have given up. I point and say, "This is where we are headed!" and I get the look of a cow chewing in its cud.
John Q. Public is worried about his job and his standard of living. He has his big screen TV for his football games that he got on sale for $799 and is estatic but there's this niggling feeling that he's getting poorer. His salary hasn't gone down but he's feels poorer. More money comes out of his pocket for health care, groceries cost a bit more, and it costs $30 more to fill his tank - even though there's an oil boom in the US right now.
And we expect him to care about about some pissant Florida town that's scanning the irises of kids eyes for "security".
Re:s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:4, Interesting)
is he any worse than Jon Q geek rooting his phone every night and downloading new ROM's for no reason?
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"Once that becomes unavoidable..."
It has.
"...it is the responsibility of all good citizens to end the police state as quickly as possible."
Just keep in mind that the only real job of any revolutionary is to make the state worse. To do little things that the state will over-react to by clamping down hard on every one and every thing. This gets more and more cud-chewers pissed off, and turns them into revolutionaries as well.
Because no revolution succeeds until the revolutionaries outnumber the revolted-aga
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I think you forgot to add "WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!"
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If you think your prices are sky high, our prices must be in geostationary orbit. Or maybe out at the L2 point.
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Re:s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, because "Oil is not a local industry. Prices are international"
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People never seem to learn that security requires people buying into it. If you shove it on them it will fail.
Re:s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:5, Interesting)
We're not really talking about security hear. We're talking about control.
It's a subtly difference concept.
Re:s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:5, Informative)
Expiring ID (Score:2)
If it's true that the iris patterns change significantly as children grow, then this would seem then to be a good thing to use for ID kids from the perspective that the ID method would "expire" after some period, making it no longer useful after the original reason no longer exists. This would be different/better than fingerprints that would be useful forever.
This is not to suggest that that I'm necessarily in favor of mandatory biometric ID screening. But if there was a biometric indicator that was relia
Re:s/Freedom/nothing/g (Score:5, Insightful)
If some kid is intent on shooting the driver and everybody else on the bus, do you really think (s)he's gonna stop for an eye exam before going hog wild?
And if it's some PTSD-suffering ex-marine blowing up the bus, it's gonna be the same situation -- even if the attacker DOES stop to look in the scanner.
In this case, you get NOTHING for your lost freedom: no security, no safety, no real knowledge after the fact ...
NOTHING
Re:s/Freedom/nothing/g (Score:5, Insightful)
If some kid is intent on shooting the driver and everybody else on the bus, do you really think (s)he's gonna stop for an eye exam before going hog wild?
And even if he does stop for the eye exam what will it confirm? The columbine killers were both students at the school they shot up (surprise!), so such a system wouldn't have stopped them.
Database thinks, yep, Harris and Klebold are on the bus.
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Of course there is gain, but I don't think we like where it is going. Take a look at the movie "Minority Report" and the daily mechanics of interaction with technology it portrayed. An iris scan was a fast biometric measure they could track every aspect of a person with, where they were, what they purchased, what interested them.
Think of how entities such as Amazon track our browsing of products and try to anticipate our needs, making suggestions for us. Think of this expanded to every aspect of life. Every
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I bet that Headmaster who over saw that spying on underage kids via laptop cameras is still working - In the UK he woudl have been sacked and banned from ever working with Children and Vunerable adults again (this is the opinion of two head governors that i know)
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Their iris patterns weren't "information" until they were scanned.
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lolwut
Is encrypted data just gibberish until it's decrypted, at which point it becomes information? No, it was always information, it was just hidden or impractical to get at without the right tools.
Same with human iris patterns. It's been information all along, it just wasn't easy or cheap to extract.
You'd have to be working with a definition of "information" so narrow as to be useless.
Re:s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:4, Interesting)
It was information completely unknown to anyone before scanning, unless someone already took high res close up pictures of children's irises. That is very unlikely.
Do you know the precise temperature (down to 0.001K) and composition at a sub-millimetric scale of all matter in a 100km radius around the center of Jupiter?
I bet you don't. Nor do I know what my own iris patterns are.
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Re:s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what would keep children REALLY safe?
Put POV cameras on everyone in the world. Have all of that accessible to law enforcement.
Now the children will be safe. Put yours on first.
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I did not know that Google Glass was set up to forward everything all the time to the Feds. ...
or
Are you a bit tarded?
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Of all the companies that have your information and have been getting NSLs ...
Which ones other than Google have been fighting them in court?
I trust that Google understands that the privacy of my data is (in the long run) important to their profits.
Re:s/Freedom/Security/g (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether you think the program is good or bad is irrelevant. The issue at hand is, they did this to minors without permission from the parents or notification to them.
But seriously though, why would you need iris scans of kids? Their reasoning is to track the students getting on and off the buses, replacing the identification cards that they students carry now. Oh wait, ALL of the kids had the scans done. What about the kids that do not ride the buses, the ones that walk or have parents/guardians pick them up and drop them off everyday. Not only are they invading the privacy by collecting personal information from a minor without consent, but they are removing a valuable lesson in responsibility, as well as collecting this data for people that will not or do not use the system at all.
What's more, the article says that all of the students went through the program, but you're telling me that there were no students at all that objected? I find it hard to believe that there were high school students involved and no one said "no".
How are you going to react when the police come door to door installing biometric scanners and requiring you to scan in/out each time you leave the house, walk into/out of a building, get into/out of your car?
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What's more, the article says that all of the students went through the program, but you're telling me that there were no students at all that objected? I find it hard to believe that there were high school students involved and no one said "no".
I dont find it so surprising. My generation is quite alarmed about things that the following generation is not alarmed about. This is so because the generations after mine were conditioned in ways that my generation was not. Likely my generation accepts things that the previous generation was alarmed about but we too didnt listen.
If you never had an absolute right to something, do you miss it?
Lets get right into the thick of the current erosion:
If you never lived in a world where the IRS didnt go aft
Iris scan vs. photo-ID (Score:2)
It is information from the moment I write it down.
Actually it is information the moment the thought pops into your head. It is just not accessible to others until you write it down or say it. I am curious about the fuss with iris scans though. This is nothing more than a detailed photograph and in many ways a lot better than a photo because you can't scan someone's iris to identify them without them being aware of it unlike facial recognition. Also, unlike finger prints, you do not leave iris prints everywhere you go so it cannot be used to track where yo
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Don't anthropomorphize information.
It hates it when you do that.
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You'll lose both, and deserve neither.
Thing is, this is one rare case where it was not simply the paranoid parents voting for a new security feature. This was done without parents' knowledge.
Yes, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. The terrorists/drug cartels/merchants of fear du jour have scared enough sheep that they've bleated to their shepherds, who have, in their self-defined benevolent wisdom, decided to do this for our safety/for the children/to stop the monster du jour.
The Security State is fueled by teh Burning Stoopid. . . .
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Your logic is erroneous, human equations aren't black and white, but mostly shades of grey. Force of arms is the only real and true power of our species. As much as any element wishes to rise above this, they will be forced back to it by other human elements. Only in it's complexity can such erroneous logic arise that there is an alternative. If you distill it down, you will find that in the end, it's by force of arms that all order and rules are established with any sustain.
The world is a small place these
scanning students for bus? (Score:5, Insightful)
pro-tip: when buses are hijacked or children kidnapped, it will be an adult that does it. As for recognizing kids, the driver can work off a paper with thumbnail pictures
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Re:scanning students for bus? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And it takes your typical government contractor to slay that particular monster.
"You wanted it in a standard data format? You didn't mention that in your RFP. That'll be (a lot) extra."
"Sorry FBI guys, our data doesn't look like your data, that'll cost a couple of million dollars to fix".
And besides, Iris scans change over time [theverge.com]. You were better off getting fingerprints.
Re:scanning students for bus? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, once this information is in the hands of a private entity or even a government entity, the DHS can demand it under the Patriot Act and not tell anybody.
At this point, you pretty much have to assume that anything ever collected about you can end up in the hands of government if they decide they want it.
Imagine a world in which children have all of their biometric data collected and cataloged before they can even spell biometric -- because it seems to be happening.
I sincerely hope there are some pretty harsh legal penalties for this, and that the companies are ordered to destroy the data. A school board has no business doing this kind of thing without parental consent. This is just blatant stupidity and over-reaching.
Re:scanning students for bus? (Score:5, Insightful)
pro-tip: when buses are hijacked or children kidnapped, it will be an adult that does it. As for recognizing kids, the driver can work off a paper with thumbnail pictures
I wouldn't put it past some of the older students(grades 6-12 certainly would include a few) to be overtly dangerous; but some iris-scanning nonsense also entirely fails to address that, since a student will be an authorized user and sail right through...
It really doesn't make much sense at all. Even if you wanted to play some electronic-orwell attendance tracking game, iris scanning is both expensive and invasive compared to, say, mag stripes on student IDs.
Is somebody's cousin the vendor? Does somebody in admin or on the school board jerk off to Minority Report every night?
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mag stripes on student IDs.
You're underestimating the extent to which the kids will subvert a system.
Re:scanning students for bus? (Score:4, Insightful)
mag stripes on student IDs.
You're underestimating the extent to which the kids will subvert a system.
Yes, and I'm also failing to understand why any of this shit is truly necessary, since it would appear for the most part (99.9999999% statistically?), over the last 50+ years of busing students to/from school, this hasn't been a justified necessity until now, in an era where taxpayers can be bent over at will to pay for greased palm programs.
And we're stupid and apathetic enough to re-elect them.
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Well, I grew up in the 1970s, and for the 50+ years before that, people hadn't needed computers in their home.
Also we used to play games in the street.
Things change.
I am playing devil's advocate here. I tend to doubt there's cause to justify such a system. But let's have real arguments about it, not false ones.
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Re:scanning students for bus? (Score:4, Insightful)
As for recognizing kids, the driver can work off a paper with thumbnail pictures
I am having a hard time understanding why even this is necessary. What problem are they trying to solve? If my daughter wants to go to a friend's house after school, she gets on her friend's schoolbus with her and goes to her house. Some of her friends occasionally ride her bus to our house. The bus driver didn't ask or care. So far this has resulted in no deaths or maiming.
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I graduated high school in 2006, but that's basically how it worked for us. If we were going to get dropped off somewhere else or ride a different bus, we just had to give the main office a note ahead of time, which they passed to the relevant bus drivers. It was a simple system that worked well. We didn't need any school ID, every student had at least a dozen teachers that could vouch for their identity if it was necessary.
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I went to high school in the 70's. We had to push the damned bus uphills. Both ways.
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So far this has resulted in no deaths or maiming.
Well it might not at your school. But kids do go missing. The article says that not a single day goes by in the district without a parent enquiring where their AWOL kid is. It might be as innocent as going to a friends house without thinking to phone home. But it might not.
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I'd say it's the parents' problem. If the district is too stupid to defend themselves from stupid parents and their stupid kids, someone needs to be replaced at the dsitricty. Technical solutions to people problems usually don't work.
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Bright kids go missing as well as stupid ones. Kids are kids, and they tend to be thoughtless and they misbehave. And nothing in the intelligence of the parent is going to change it. And no amount of intelligence is going to tell them whether the kid has been thoughtless, disobedient, or been kidnapped.
Just calling people stupid is no answer to anything.
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Well it might not at your school. But kids do go missing.
Yup. This has happened to my daughter several times. She didn't come home on the bus as expected. This is how I dealt with it: I dialed her cellphone number. When she answered, I asked her where she was, and she told me.
For parents that don't trust their kids with cellphones, and think their kids are too stupid to get on the right school bus, they could strap a bright orange cone on the kid's head with the school bus number printed on it.
Either way, once school is over, I don't see why it is the school
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So far this has resulted in no deaths or maiming.
Well it might not at your school. But kids do go missing. The article says that not a single day goes by in the district without a parent enquiring where their AWOL kid is. It might be as innocent as going to a friends house without thinking to phone home. But it might not.
And iris scanning prevents this from happening because...?
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am having a hard time understanding why even this is necessary. What problem are they trying to solve?
The problem they're solving is an unholy combination of over-the-top hover-parenting and "internal passport" movement control on the part of government, summarized as: "We will know where you are at all times, and you will be where we know you are supposed to be at all times."
Freedom of movement, like most other freedoms (thought, speech, faith) is a problem for control freaks. Your freedom impinges on t
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pro-tip: when buses are hijacked or children kidnapped, it will be an adult that does it. As for recognizing kids, the driver can work off a paper with thumbnail pictures
Neither of which address the problem being targeted. This is about kids going missing. Parent wonder's why Jonny hasn't arrived home, school knows what if any bus they got on and where they got off. Kid gets on school bus, doesn't arrive at school, school knows kid's gone AWOL.
A low-wage bus driver could be given thumbnail pictures and be required to check the kids on. Which would slow things up. But good luck on making sure the right kids have been ticked off then leaving the bus. That's like trying to hol
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Man, what a complicated way to solve a simple problem.
The free market to the rescue. [amazon.com]
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That won't work. You'd need a version with a padlock.
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Oh, the ironies... (Score:5, Funny)
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Which, sadly, the "o" in "Bill of Rights" was concealing an iris scanning camera.
Re:Oh, the ironies... (Score:5, Interesting)
Illinois high school teacher John Dryden has been reprimanded and docked a day’s pay after informing his students of their Constitutional rights before administering a school-mandated survey about “at-risk behavior.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/29/high-school-teacher-punished-for-informing-students-of-their-fifth-amendment-right/
Re:Oh, the ironies... (Score:4, Interesting)
Illinois high school teacher John Dryden has been reprimanded and docked a day’s pay after informing his students of their Constitutional rights before administering a school-mandated survey about “at-risk behavior.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/29/high-school-teacher-punished-for-informing-students-of-their-fifth-amendment-right/
Sadly, it doesn't surprise me. When I was teaching high school journalism, I got repeated verbal orders to infringe on student free speech, which I was supposed to follow up on without a paper trail so that admin couldn't be connected to the violation. Got in a fair amount of trouble for "failing to do so" a few times. Needless to say, I don't work there anymore.
Re:Oh, the ironies... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Beck (Score:3)
Glenn Beck loves big government, as long as it is bombing people he doesn't like or arresting them for drugs that he doesn't like. The deficit? It is horrible, just horrible, unless they are printing up money for war.
He had a real chance to make a real difference with Ron Paul, with hours to talk about him on the radio...but the few times he mentioned him was to crap all over him. Oh the ironies that Beck just likes the Constitution when it works in his favor.
A pox on him.
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Thank you so much for sharing this. I immediately went and signed the petitions in his support. This man is awesome.
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And just out of curiosity, what right was being trampled on here? The Bill of Rights actually says very little about the right to privacy.
Don't get me wrong, I think that what the school is doing is a waste of time and money. I skimmed the article and the school claims it's basically being implemented so they know where and when students get on and off the bus. i.e. if Little Johnny get's off at the wrong stop, the school can now figure out which stop he got off at and when. Presumably, they could e
imagine the confusion if (Score:3, Funny)
Where are these parents (Score:3, Insightful)
Where are these parents when it's time to protest actual privacy violations?
Re:Where are these parents (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Where are these parents (Score:4, Insightful)
Cheering on the TSA and hooting it up for the Patriot Act.
Overkill Much? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Overkill Much? (Score:4, Insightful)
We need military levels of record keeping to keep track of school children getting on buses?.
Follow the money. Whoever implemented the system for a juicy fee probably has good connections to the school board.
The whole thing sounds like boondoggle pork to me.
Backdoor Contact lens??? (Score:5, Funny)
i wonder how hard it would be to make a contact lens that caused the scanner to throw an error (or worse was a backdoor into the system).
Scanning Image
Processing
Identified Krystal Rayne Dawnmeadow approved SYSTEM ADMIN ALL ACCESS
(and of course daddy would have told his favorite minion exactly what to punch into a terminal to .....)
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Just ask little Bobby Tables, I hear he got new contacts.
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Krystal Rayne Dawnmeadow
An error of type 420 has occurred.
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its all part of The Hack brother would you expect a girl with that name to be a hackers minion??
oblig: Ben Franklin quote (Score:2)
So what exactly is the problem with this? (Score:2)
Unlike RFID, iris scans can't be used to remotely track your movements, and unlike fingerprints they can't be used to identify your presence after the fact. (Well they can but only with your permission. Even good security camera mostly produces pictures that makes identifying faces difficult. It certainly can't take a sharp enough image of your iris from a distance.)
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Really? It's a government entity collecting unique biometric data to be stored in perpetuity for no defined purpose. No communication with parents, no direction as to it's use, and school officials employing the typical school system no-think by saying, "I do what I am told". The whole thing smacks of slimy Big Brother tactics.
But then again, you sound like one of those types who like to allow minors to undergo surgical procedures without the parent's consent. It takes a village, absent the parents p
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Are you seriously suggesting that invading the sanctity of the body is in the same category as taking a close-up picture of their eyes?
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First, Iris scans aren't necessarily stable over time.
Second, we're working on distance [consumertraveler.com] viewing of irises.
Not that this changes the fundamental issues of parent neglect, apathy and over arching government. But as usual, the government is proving to be a bunch of technological dullards.
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they are verifying the kids got on and off the school bus
if something happens to a kid the parents will be the first ones to sue the school and say that the school is responsible for keeping track of their kids, etc, etc ,etc
except when the schools start to do this there is outrage
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what's the upside to it? apart from them having a db of the irises after doing it, that is.
what's the downside to them keeping a db of penis lengths? nothing. so let's measure everyone!
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flaccid, semi, or fully at attention? I have to know how to prepare.
No big deal (Score:3)
Schools can say it was for "Reproductive Health" reasons.
No, there is no concern about over reaching governance!
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Schools can say it was for "Reproductive Health" reasons.
I guess that lends credence to the phrase 'being screwed up to your eyeballs'.
Okay? (Score:2)
This is ridiculous... (Score:2)
I'm all for parents and schools knowing who is getting on the bus and such, as a basic answer to the age old question "Do you know where your kids are right now?" question. But this is insane. Are there really that many kids that a bus driver or school has to have Bio-metric information on their students? Is that data destroyed when the student leaves the school to go to another school, drops out, or graduates? Who else has access to such data? It's bad enough that there are smart chips in Student ID's
Outraged won't fix the problem (Score:2)
Stop giving up your civil liberties so readily everytime the news starts churning out the Terrorism drama with every "think of the children" campaign. Life is always going to have it's dangers and none of the DHS/TSA stuff to date has saved us from any of it*. The only reason TFA has happened is because people let it happen.
[*] - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/01/abolish_the_dep.html [schneier.com]
Well, both the contractor and the school are happy (Score:4, Insightful)
This iris scan device is expensive, ineffective and excessive.
But there are money for the contractors, bribe for the school administrators. Everyone is happy, right?
Iris is a spherical muscle (Score:2)
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IMO, this is a terrible place for the feds to get involved. What is appropriate for middle schools in urban high-crime areas is not appropriate for elementary schools in rural North Dakota.
School violence is not historically higher now than it has ever been, and overall violence in the US is at an all-time low.
The centralization of education has been uniformly terrible for the US.
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The factions/fractions of which you speak are likely the 2 party system, and that exists independently now of any states rights. The powers in both parties pander to a few hot button (but ultimately of little importance) issues to please their base, while steadily ruining this country for their own greed and the greed of those with
Re:If anyone should know.. (Score:5, Informative)
All of these issues are pretty much based on so much of the violence which the US schools have been faced for the last 20+ yrs.
Juvenile violent crime has been falling for the past 20 years. These issues must be based on something else.
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What an ignorant statement. We are a union of states. I don't know where the hell you hail from, but the concept is that states determine their own laws and govern themselves. I don't know where people have this ass-backward concept that somehow it all comes from the top-down and the Federal government legislates and controls everything.
Additionally, this has NOTHING to do with "violence the schools have been facing for the last twenty years". The violence has not changed dramatically (especially of the kin
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Re:So let's give 'em *MORE* tax money! YAY!!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Bush never performed "extrajudicial killings" on US citizens.
I suppose we don't really know....because the Patriot Act enacted under Bush, made it legal to disappear US citizens in secrecy.