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Thirty-one student supporters of local activist group Students Stand Up (Twitter feed) were arrested during protests against budget cuts at the University of Vermont yesterday.
At three o’clock yesterday a group of about a hundred UVM students staged a sit-in at the offices of university president Dan Fogel. Seven of those students sat in inside Fogel’s suite, and were arrested in the afternoon, while the rest of the students, protesting immediately outside the presidential offices, were allowed to remain for a time.
According to the Burlington Free Press, the students’ list of thirteen demands included “revoking recent reductions in faculty, capping tuition increases at the rate of inflation and recovering all the bonuses paid to administrators in 2008 and 2009.”
At 9:30 in the evening the university shut the building to incoming students. It was announced that the building would close at ten o’clock, and that students who remained after closing would be subject to arrest. About half the sixty students then occupying the building left before arrests began, but at least twenty-five — including at least one who had been arrested earlier in the day — were booked on trespassing charges.
By the time police began making arrests, several hundred students had gathered outside the building in support of the sit-in. All but one of the protesters were released immediately after being booked.
A rally at the university’s library is planned for noon today. I’ll update this post as news comes in.
April 24 morning update: About a hundred students attended the noon rally, where students called for UVM president Dan Fogel’s resignation. Plans for more actions are in the works. Also, Students Stand Up has a Facebook group.
Last week the Cal State Northridge Daily Sundial ran an article on student drinking habits that claimed that American first-year students “spend more time drinking than studying.” Their source for this claim was a deeply flawed report produced by a company that markets anti-alcohol programs to college campuses.
As we reported last month, the study in question was little more than a marketing handout for Outside the Classroom, a for-profit company that produces anti-drinking programming for use by student affairs administrators.
The study received quite a lot of attention on its release, in large part because it was presented at the annual meeting of NASPA, a professional association for professionals in the student affairs field. What received much less attention was the fact that Outside the Classroom is a major corporate sponsor of NASPA, and paid for time at the group’s annual meeting.
And the problems with the study don’t end with its sponsorship. Its methodology is questionable and its most often repeated conclusions are not supported by the evidence it offers.
In short, the Outside the Classroom “study” is shoddy, anti-student research from a company with a financial interest in portraying students as problem drinkers. Disseminating it doesn’t bring us any closer to actually understanding student drinking habits, healthy or unhealthy.
This morning the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched at school over suspicions that she was hiding prescription-strength Advil somewhere on her body.
The transcript of the arguments will be released later — and I’ll update this post when I have them — but reporters who were present describe the two sides’ attorneys staking out extremely different interpretations of the constitutional issues at stake.
Adam B. Wolf, representing the student, Savana Redding, said that schools must have “location specific” information to search inside a student’s underwear. Even if a student is suspected of hiding weapons or heroin, he said, a school has no right to conduct such a search without evidence that contraband is hidden on the student’s body.
The attorney for the school, on the other hand, said that the school would have been legally justified in conducting a body cavity search on Redding, if they considered it appropriate.
The Court’s ruling in the case is likely to come sometime in June.
4:15 pm update: The transcripts of the oral arguments have been posted (PDF). I’ll read and comment when I get the chance.
6:15 pm update: Reading the transcripts now. The Baltimore Sun badly misrepresented the school attorney’s response to the cavity search question. More later.
Back in December I wrote about the parents of two high school students who were suing their daughters’ school for suspending them from the cheerleading squad after administrators acquired nude cellphone photos of them.
The students say they never distributed the photos. Though the pictures were circulating widely in the school without the students’ knowledge or permission, none of the students who forwarded or received the photos were ever punished.
In their lawsuit, the families say that the school allowed more school officials to view the photos than was necessary, that they did not conduct a proper investigation of the distribution of the photos, and that they failed to report the incident to the police. (The parents themselves filed a police report on the incident after they learned of it.)
That’s the story as it stood in December. I did some follow-up research this week, and here’s what I found:
The Peoria, Arizona Unified School District will let gay eighth grader Chris Quintanilla wear a “Rainbows Are Gay” wristband to school.
As we reported last month, Quintanilla’s principal instructed him to remove the wristband when he saw him wearing it in a school hallway.
The wristband ban was apparently part of a larger pattern of behavior on the principal’s part. According to Quintanilla’s mother Natali, when she expressed concern that her son was being harassed at school for being gay, the principal told her that he wouldn’t be a target “if he didn’t put it out there the way he does.”
But the ACLU is now claiming victory, saying that the district “has assured the American Civil Liberties Union that it will no longer prevent [Quintanilla] from wearing [the] wristband at school.”
The district, for its part, says the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding. Why it took them more than a month to clear it up remains unclear.
studentactivism.net 
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