Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

First I agree. I think the administration thought it was a hoax bomb. If it was that in reality that then it deserves serious consequences. I have not seen anything that says Ahmed thought or acted as it was that. Once you involve the police you open up a whole different set of rules & rights. The school as a civil authority has a right to question a student in way the police do not. Second as a teacher, you are stuck following the school's policies no matter how poorly thought out. Involving the police on routine school discipline issues is bad policy.

The school system has gone way overboard on that. We need to advocate change in a reasonable way. Yes talking to lawyers should be the last resort. The school can afford more lawyers than I can anyway. I would hope reasonable people can come to a reasonable conclusion. I never came close to involving lawyers with my children school careers. But having on your school record suspended for making terrorist or bomb threats can effect the college you get into & rather or not you can get a security clearance later in life. That is worth a fight and not accepting it as "policy".

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

I do think at least passive bias played a role on the part of the admin and teacher while the admin and police were far too robotic and inflexible. No one really tried to think through a non text bookish way to deal with this situation and part of that was because both fiction and nonfiction media had told them everything they thought they needed to know about it.

Movies and TV make bombs look obvious, news (and certain politicians) associate a religion with explosive devises, and both fiction and nonfiction media rarely associate people of color with technical or science related things reducing his chance for the benefit of the doubt. With those three things in the back of their mind (or the forefront) their decisions are unsurprising.

Just think back to when you first heard the story. It probably seemed immediately obvious to you what the teacher, admin, and police were thinking because you too know the stereotypes they acted on.

The biggest problem is that punishment was doled out despite the fact they were after all wrong, and that there was no apology.

To Daisies points:

The support piled up from multiple independent entities and just grew, plus for many it's just good publicity. But the other important aspect is that it needs to be communicated to everyone in the US and the world that even if some people in our country are going to treat people this way many, hopefully most, don't support their actions. This incident having become very high profile was a good time to say that.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

I'm not expressing an opinion either way! But for the purposes of the discussion know that even creating a hoax bomb is all kinds of illegal in Texas.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

... creating a public disturbance, disorderly public conduct, resisting arrest, ...

A wide variety of charges that he could have been arrested and charged with.

But lets not loose sight of it's a clock. He said it was a clock. It was a clock. Not a bomb, hoax bomb, pseudo bomb, etc. A clock.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

I should have expressed myself better. A hoax bomb or even a bomb threat without any physical bomb will get you in trouble with the school and probably arrested at anywhere in the country.

What reasons, if any, the school thought this was legitimate threat, they probably cannot discuss because of privacy issues. So we are only getting the story from one side. Please don't take this as me defending the actions the school took, but acknowledging that we might not know the whole story.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

Please correct me if I'm wrong but to my knowledge, the school didn't evacuate. This is a problem across the county. If there are any thoughts that they actually believe their is a real bomb in the school, the student safety should be #1, and the school should be evacuated. Same goes if they get a bomb threat. This is an issue at my school. Almost EVERY year, we get a bomb threat whether it be via phone call or written on the bathroom walls. Sometimes, it happens twice a year. I'm not exaggerating. And what did our school do? Nothing! I'm sorry, but if there is any chance of there being a bomb in the school, the student need to be evacuated in order to keep their safety the number 1 priority. And this should be at every school.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

The school didn't evacuate because it was a clock. Not a bomb. It was a clock. Not a hoax bomb. It was a clock.

Once the teacher went to the administration and they called the police it became a racial attack on a 14 year old boy and his family by 3 police officers. (Not to let the school off the hook)

Not a bomb. Not a hoax bomb. Racial attack of a brown boy that has a Muslim name and is of the Muslim faith and has well known brown parents who are well know for their Muslim faith and activism. Attack by police in a town who's Mayor is a well known ilsamphobic.

Not a bomb. Racial attack.

And we will hear the "schools side" when the lawsuit is settled by the school and the police.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

If the kid brought his case to us we would know it was a clock he took apart. And it seems his engineering teacher knew it was a clock but told him to put it away and not show it around. But it was his English teacher that took the device to the administration (after the alarm went off apparently). It is not unreasonable than an English teacher would not be sure what was going on.

Lots of schools have zero tolerance policies about things like this (we live about 30 miles from this school and I assume the policies are similar). The administration personnel involved could lose their jobs if they did not refer it to the police. And the police have standard procedures which did result in no charges (after taking too long).

The mayor of Irving is a goofball. But should we infer that every public official in the town is a racist. Isn't that taking things too far?

What is and is not a "hoax bomb" is not up to us. The law literally says anything than can "cause concern to an official".

With respect, we do not know this. And charging a wide array of persons with racism is pretty out there. Note that this high school is less than 14% white so people of different colors and backgrounds is the overwhelming norm. Given the lack of information from both sides, is it responsible to throw the racism card at every turn?

Something is amiss that leads to this kid getting treated so poorly. But I'm thinking bureaucracy is more to blame.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

I've flown with a similar mix of stuff (in place of a cartoon timer, I had an XBee set up). Flown as in, it was in my carry on bag. Only in addition to said wires and a 2S Lipo battery (which actually is mildly explosive) I also had a dozen very large servos (which look like these nice chunks of metal on the TSA scanners).. in short, to anyone who didn't know what things were, probably something to at least glance at.[1] Two different airports (Tampa and DTW) both let me through without so much as a second glance. [2]

Either TSA isn't doing their job and should apparently hire TX school teachers or there's more going on here. [3]

But, in the interest of not assuming malice where I can't prove it, I'll err on the side of this being a case of Zero Tolerance becoming Zero Common Sense.





[1] I had data sheets and order forms for everything in this box with the parts in case there was any investigation. And I'd arrived at the airport 2 hours early.

[2] Though they did make darn sure to make me get rid of my 3/4 empty tube of toothpaste because the container was more than 3 oz...

[3] What I'm hinting at, I'm white, and prejudices are totally a thing.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

I once tried to take a similar set of H/W through (custom FPGA boards, a test harness but no batteries) the Tel Aviv airport. It cost me an entire day (was delayed 6 hours but next flight was the next day) while they asked a person to come in who was qualified to tell them my stuff was not dangerous! The same H/W usually gets me a dusting and a explosives test in most US airports, but not always. And I'm an old white guy.

Blame the bureaucracy and impeach the Irving mayor for stupidity.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

I think the situation of airport security and highschool classroom security aren't all that comparable. The security measures that are in place in airports can be mandated by the government and are almost universally more strict than a Texas high school. Metal detectors, fully body scanners, cavity searches, and the like are not found in Ahmed's school. Bringing a STEM project to school should not require the same screening as bringing one to an airport.

In your case it's clear that skin color had nothing to do with it, you just brought the electronics to a place with astronomical security.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

To my understanding they didn't believe it was a bomb, they believed it was a hoax bomb. They didn't evacuate because the school determined early on that it wasn't going to hurt anyone.


This is the issue that I'm surprised people aren't debating more... Why did the school beleive it was a hoax bomb? They believed that Ahmed intentionally brought a fake bomb to school. They thought that he was trying to scare people by pretending to build a bomb. IFF they thought he brought in a fake bomb, then they must have thought that he had malicious intent.

Why did they think he had malicious intent?

They either believed he had malicious intent, or they were trying to harass him. It's hard to come up with a non-racial motivation for those two possibilities.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

In many ways, the zero tolerance rules at local schools are worse than the TSA. They automatically pass almost everything up to the police. This is what I'm saying - the automatic escalation from teacher to administration to police is an entirely bureaucratic response. Many in this thread are asserting some sort of -ism is involved and that may be but it would not be the school at fault but the police. Even charging the police with -isms is a stretch w/o more information since the police also have standard operating procedures. In this case the police decided not to act further. How did the police treat the student? We don't really know. I agree with you that the local police end up being less strict than the TSA (who can sniff test things they don't understand). I disagree about the requirement for security - a bomb or gun or hoax on a plane or in a school are both great risks.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

I definitely agree that the Zero Tolerance system made this situation significantly worse than it should have been. I'm just not sure that any student with some sort of electronic board in their backpack would be treated the same way. See my above post about the school determining that Ahmed had malicious intents. If the letter of the Zero Tolerance law is "if you suspect something to be a bomb, you must report it to the police", then the school still suspected him of malicious intent.

Re: Can someone in the Irving TX area "draft" this young man?
 

I see what you are saying. I doubt the school ever thought it was a real bomb or they would have evacuated the school. But even perpetrating a silly hoax is not legal in Texas. And like I said above I have been treated with some suspicion in airports for unusual looking stuff in my luggage. And I'm not brown or young or Muslim.

I think the kid did a silly thing. His engineering teacher told him to put it away and he didn't. But 14 year olds, of all colors, do silly things all the time. Then the bureaucracy reared its ugly head.