eSchool News » Safety & Security

New Jersey town bans texting while walking

staff and wire services reports — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:10:13 +0000

As a slew of U.S. states have passed laws to ban texting while driving, one New Jersey town upped the ante with its texting-while-walking ban. Pedestrians in Fort Lee, New Jersey will have to stop to text, following the passage of a new law that imposes $85 fines on walkers caught texting. Fort Lee Police Chief Thomas Ripoli cited numbers of pedestrian crashes to support the ban: Last year there were 74 crashes involving pedestrians; three pedestrians were killed this year, according to the Record’s NorthJersey.com.

“It’s a big distraction. Pedestrians aren’t watching where they are going and they are not aware,” Ripoli said during an announcement of the ban.

Following a brief warning period, New Jersey police began issuing fines to distracted walkers near the end of March, with more than 117 violations recorded to date…

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What Romney should have said to schoolchildren about his ‘prank’ and bullying

staff and wire services reports — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:52:19 +0000

My colleague Jason Horowitz wrote in this Washington Post story about how Mitt Romney, when he was a senior at an elite private high school in Michigan, led a group of boys who “tackled” a boy who was presumed to be gay and had bleached-blond hair, held him down and chopped his hair off with a scissors even as the boy pleaded for help, Valerie Strauss for the Washington Post reports. A spokesman for Romney told Horowitz that the presumptive Republican presidential candidate didn’t remember the incident which was the most serious of many “pranks” Romney was reported to have engaged in as a student. Yes, Romney said he didn’t remember behavior that today would clearly be defined as bullying and would land the perpetrators in serious trouble. (I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it is worse that he doesn’t remember or simply said he didn’t.) Some of his friends who were involved in the episode remembered it well enough to talk to Horowitz in some detail. In any case, today, as the story of this incident spread, Romney talked briefly about it during an interview with Fox News Talk Radio…

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Teacher suspended for making students wear dog collar as punishment

staff and wire services reports — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:51:13 +0000

Laurie Bailey-Cutkomp, a 47-year-old Zephyrhills High School science teacher in Zephyrhills, Fla., is under fire after photos of her students wearing dog collars as punishment for bad behavior surfaced on Facebook, WTSP-TV reports. Dubbed the “cone of shame” by the teacher, the photos are causing equal amounts of outrage and laughter from parents and students in the district. Bailey-Cutkomp reportedly used the cone for disciplinary infractions like drinking soda in class.

“I was disgusted, very disgusted,” one parent told the station. “…That’s a human, not an animal. You’re not spaying or neutering that person.”

Others, including student Tanisha Medina, thought it was a harmless joke.

“She just did it as a joke and said she was gonna punish us by doing it,” Medina told WTSP. “But she asked us first and we were all laughing and joking around.”

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Court dismisses two counts, upholds others, in professor’s child-porn viewing case

staff and wire services reports — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:53:08 +0000

Viewing child pornography online isn’t a crime, the New York Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in the case of a college professor whose work computer was found to have stored more than a hundred illegal images in its web cache, U.S. News reports. The court dismissed one of the two counts of promoting a sexual performance of a child and one of the dozens of counts of possession of child pornography on which James D. Kent was convicted. The court upheld the other counts against Kent, an assistant professor of public administration at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Kent—who said at his sentencing that he “abhorred” child pornography and argued that someone else at Marist must have placed the images on his computer—was sentenced to one to three years in state prison in August 2009. The decision rests on whether accessing and viewing something on the Internet is the same as possessing it, and whether possessing it means you had to procure it. In essence, the court said no to the first question and yes to the second…

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Young, gay student who fired stun gun at school expelled

staff and wire services reports — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:45:22 +0000

Darnell “Dynasty” Young, the 17-year-old openly gay student who was suspended for bringing a stun gun to school to ward off bullies, has now been expelled, MSNBC reports. In a statement obtained by the network, Indianapolis Public Schools said Young will not be able to re-enroll in the district until January 7, 2013. The incident in question occurred on April 16, when six students allegedly surrounded Young, called him names and threatened to beat up him. Young then pulled the weapon from his bag and fired it in the air. Minutes after, he was handcuffed.

In an appearance on CNN yesterday, Young’s mother, Chelisa Grimes, told the network she believes she did the right thing by giving her son the weapon.

“I do not promote violence — not at all — but what is a parent to do when she has done everything that she felt she was supposed to do,” Grimes told CNN. “I did feel like there was nothing else left for me to do, but protect my child.”

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Watch: High school principal accused of ‘spying’ on Facebook, resigns

staff and wire services reports — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:34:06 +0000

It’s a cardinal rule among educators: Interacting with students on social media, if it is allowed, requires caution and the same amount of professionalism that would be conducted offline in a classroom setting. But what happens when a teacher breaks this rule? Asks Mashable. That’s the unsettling situation the community of Clayton, Missouri, is facing after several students and parents accepted a Facebook friendship request from “Suzy Harriston.” The mysterious figure — who had a nondescript Facebook profile photo and more than 300 friends, many of them from Clayton High School — is said to have actually been the school’s principal.

“Whoever is friends with Suzy Harriston on Facebook needs to drop them. It is the Clayton Principal,” wrote 2011 graduate Chase Haslett on Facebook. Haslett’s post on April 5 warranted several reactions, including the obvious: “How do you know?”

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Parents of boy forcibly tattooed sue school district

staff and wire services reports — Fri, 04 May 2012 13:20:11 +0000

The parents of a New Hampshire teenager who was assaulted and forcibly tattooed on the buttocks by four older students during school hours have filed suit against the school district, Reuters reports. Michael and Tammy Austin are seeking unspecified damages from the district in Concord, New Hampshire, which they say failed to provide a safe environment for their son and to protect him from bullying in the May 2010 incident. A group of older students lured the boy, who was 14 at the time, to a house near Concord High School, where they tattooed a picture of a penis and the words ‘Poop Dick’ on his buttocks, according to the lawsuit filed in Merrimack County Superior Court.

“We believe they had a duty to protect, and they failed in that task,” Stephen Duggan, an attorney for the parents, said in an interview this week…

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Gay student faces expulsion for firing stun gun to fend off bullies

staff and wire services reports — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:27:54 +0000

Darnell “Dynasty” Young, a 17-year-old gay student at Arsenal Tech High School in Indianapolis, Ind., is facing possible expulsion after he fired a stun gun at bullies he claims were about to beat him up, the Indianapolis Star reports. According to the paper, Young said classmates frequently harassed him, at times throwing rocks and taunting him for dressing too flamboyantly. Chelisa Grimes, Young’s mother, also told the paper that when she went to school officials to complain, they placed the blame on Young for being “openly gay.” The conflict came to a head on April 16 when six students allegedly surrounded Young, threatening to cause him physical harm…

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Young student urinates on class MacBooks, costs school $36,000

staff and wire services reports — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:52:53 +0000

An 11-year-old male student at Upper Allen Elementary School in Mechanicsburg, Pa., is facing serious consequences after he urinated on the school’s MacBook computers, causing around $36,000 in damage, WHTM-TV reports. According to the station, the student urinated on a computer cart that was sitting in the hallway carrying numerous laptops. The boy, whose name was not released due to his age, was arrested by the Upper Allen Township police and faces charges of institutional vandalism and criminal mischief. The Patriot-News reports the boy has since been turned over to the Cumberland County Juvenile Probation Department. Unfortunately for the school, Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee says the computers are beyond repair…

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eSN Publisher’s Report: Creating a safe and positive learning environment

Contributor — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:31:04 +0000

Schools can use climate data to measure how well they are supporting the learning environment.

Editor’s note: This Publisher’s Report was sponsored by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Is it possible to identify and address bullying and other negative behavior at schools before it erupts into violence?

School bullying is now at crisis levels in the U.S., and it’s one of the primary challenges that school leaders face in managing the learning environment and ensuring that students feel safe and ready to learn. As school leaders look for ways to deal with this problem, some are turning to a promising new technology platform for help.

Before high-quality curriculum or pedagogy can foster student achievement, schools must establish a positive climate where staff, students, and parents all feel accepted and respected and where learning—not safety—is the main focus, experts say. Feeling safe and respected can be critical to students’ motivation to learn. It’s not hard to imagine how a student’s academic goals would come second to making it through the day without being bullied.

Click here to download a PDF of this report on Page 2.

Bullying has risen to national attention as an early indicator of violent crimes and suicide among adolescents. Although bullying occurs at all age levels, it is most pervasive during the adolescent and teen years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Forty-nine states plus the District of Columbia have passed legislation defining and outlawing bullying. State legislatures have mandated that school districts identify methods to document and decrease bullying and to find and implement non-violent conflict resolution methods.

“The call to action for districts is the growing number of incidents of school violence and their potential liability if bullying is not identified and reported,” said Laura Murray Parker, senior director of solution strategy for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH). “A positive school climate that is conducive to learning affects everyone associated with the school, including students, staff, parents, and the outer community.”

In the age of school accountability and data-driven decision-making, district leaders have focused on using data to improve academic performance. Now, HMH aims to help educators apply this approach to creating an environment that positions students and teachers for success outside the curriculum.

District leaders have been searching for a way to assess their schools’ climate according to three parameters, the company says: (1) safety and security, (2) teacher effectiveness and classroom management, and (3) character education and emotional learning.