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Frustrated with students’ use of cell phones in class, a British Columbia high school principal took action last week — he bought a signal jammer online, and plugged it in at his office.
Unfortunately for him, jamming cell phones is illegal under Canadian law.
Principal Steve Gray installed the gizmo on Tuesday. By the end of the day Wednesday rumors of the jammer’s existence were beginning to spread. On Thursday, more than a quarter of Port Hardy Secondary School’s 343 students skipped classes in protest, and on Friday morning Gray took the jammer offline.
“We did our research on the Internet,” said Amber Wright, an eleventh grader who helped organize the student strike. “Breaking the law is not a good way to send a message.”
Students said that their parents use the cell phones to keep in touch with them, and that relaying messages through the school is slow and cumbersome.
Principal Gray told the Toronto Globe and Mail that he himself carries a cell phone at school, but that he only uses it in emergencies.
A student who prosecutors say hacked into his university’s computer network last fall, raising students’ grades and cutting their tuition charges, has been found guilty of five federal charges.
The government says that Marcus Barrington, then a student at Florida A&M University, conspired with a group of other students to alter fellow students’ grades and change residency records from out-of-state to in-state. The university is said to have lost more than $100,000 in out-of-state tuition revenue as a result.
Barrington’s two co-defendants, Lawrence Secrease and Christopher Jacquette, filed guilty pleas. Both testified against him in his trial, which ended Friday. The jury took just two hours to find Barrington guilty on all charges.
Barrington’s attorney made a statement after the verdict. “It’s sad to see these young people get in trouble especially on this kind of conduct,” he said. “In my day, it would have been a cheating incident and today it’s a federal crime. I just don’t understand what the difference is.”
Barrington faces a possible prison term of nearly thirty years when he is sentenced in June.
(via UWire)
It was announced over the weekend that administrators at Boston College had vetoed a planned campus appearance by former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. The student sponsors of the engagement, who included the BC chapter of the College Democrats, were said to be seeking an off-campus venue to move the speech to.
Now comes word that the event will take place on campus as originally planned, though without Ayers in attendance. Ayers will remain in Chicago, where he lives, and speak via satellite hookup to the audience at the college’s Devlin Hall.
His speech, at 6 o’clock this evening, will be open to BC students, faculty, and staff only.
Postscript: A separate Ayers speech in an educational venue has just been cancelled outright. He had been scheduled to give a talk at Naperville North High School in Illinois next week, but his invitation has been withdrawn. A statement from the school district’s superintendent cited “the level of emotion and outrage” that had greeted news of the speech as the reason for the cancellation.
Update: The BC administration nixed the video link, too. Here’s the chief of the campus police, Robert Morse: “It is canceled, there is no telecast. It’s virtually the same thing, it would be viewed by the community as the same thing.” The speech organizers held a forum on academic freedom instead.
Second Update: BC cancelled Ayers’ speech because of alleged links between the Weather Underground and the notorious 1970 murder of Boston police officer Walter Schroeder. But Schroeder was killed in the course of a bank robbery that was intended to fund the Black Panthers, not the Weather Underground, and there is apparently no evidence of any Weather connection to the crime.
An Australian friend draws our attention to two stories that appeared in the Australian press last week:
The government of Western Australia is considering placing police officers in that state’s high schools, in response to a recent increase in assaults on teachers there…
…And an officer assigned to an “elite unit designed to be the public face of [the] police in high schools” in the state of New South Wales has been arrested on charges that he sexually assaulted a child.
This is just one incident, of course. But it does serve as a reminder that whatever the benefits to teachers and students of bringing police onto school grounds may be, the practice carries real costs as well.
(Thanks to lauredhel of Hoyden About Town for the tip.)
Here’s the latest communiqué from The New School In Exile:
No, we haven’t forgotten about April 1st, and neither has the administration. But don’t worry, there is plenty in the works, and the day should not disappoint.
Think carnival. Think circus. Think roving flash mobs. Think zombie Kerrey and Murtha armies. Think beanbag circus freaks and superheroes. Think shutting the school down. Think fun 
We’ll see you on the flip side!
I’ll admit it. They’ve got my attention.
Update: NSIE has put up a countdown clock on their website. Zero hour is just after one o’clock tomorrow afternoon — 1:01:59 pm, to be exact. I have no idea what, if anything, this means.
studentactivism.net 
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