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

Sounds like FRC could be a good fit for this young man, and let him know that there are people out there who value kids like this.

From the Dallas Morning News: "Northwest Dallas County
Irving 9th-grader arrested after taking homemade clock to school: 'So you tried to make a bomb?' "

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/commu...-to-school.ece

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

Team 3370- Aftershock, is based out of Irving.

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

I too think that this would be a good idea to try and find a local FTC or FRC team for him to participate on. Could anyone that knows Aftershock get in contact with them?

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

After reading the story, I understand why the school overreacted. Stereotypical bombs have a large countdown clock. I doubt most bombs actually have those on them. Any self educated person could look at the wiring and tell if it's actually a clock or not. I would have probably known that before I joined my team's electronics sub team. It's a sad story that he may be charged with a hoax bomb over some English teachers lack of knowledge on electronics. (Keep in mind I don't know what the clock looked like. I can't watch the video since I'm in a quiet place.) Hope some FIRST team can recruit him. He just sounds like a good old robotics geek (like the rest of us) that didn't think about the fact that his clock may look like the stereo typical bomb.

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

100% guaranteed this "overreaction" doesn't occur if he is white and his name isn't Ahmed Mohammed...that's the real problem.

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

...and it is mid-September...

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

If our culture sees electronics with 7 segment displays as nothing but bombs, then we really need to keep working on changing that culture.

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

Cory's answer defines the actual issue.

When I was a sophomore in my high school Aerospace class, we built model rockets and my group's rocket looked pretty awesome so I decided to keep the rocket. During lunch that day, one of our deans walked up and examined it to make sure it didn't have an engine/bomb/explosive in it. He was not particularly worried or suspicious, he just needed to "make sure". I wonder if it would have changed for me if I had been from the same cultural/religious background as this poor kid.

This year I am participating in a seminar course discussing the implications and definitions of terrorism, and from what we've discussed in class it is really stupid to think that this kid is a terrorist. If the school is jumping to these conclusions, then they are misinformed about what terrorism is. The issue of terrorism goes much further than the shallow thinking that these school officials are exerting.

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

Don't you know? Kids who wear NASA shirts to school are obviously up to no good and hate America...

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

+1

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

In a positive update, the kid just got a personal invite to the White House by POTUS.

:)

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656

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

Boy, we have been bringing our "cannon" to all sorts of school events. Good thing it doesn't have a count down clock on it. :rolleyes:

The teacher reportedly thinks it looks like a bomb and keeps it. Does that sound like a good plan?

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

Yes they do. This one was a clock, so I think it was counting UP. That makes it harder to be a bomb.

Related, someone found on Amazon these $4 clock kits (with free shipping) and are sending them to the school.

Feel free to help start the STEM program there:

MacArthur High School
attn: Daniel Cummings
3700 N MacArthur Blvd,
Irving, TX 75062

Or send a clock kit to your local high school, maybe you can get one of your local kids a trip to DC to meet the President!

I'm happy for him that it's going to work out, sad that it happened in the first place.

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

Haha. Yeah, after seeing what some of you all responded to my post, there are some majors issues with the teacher who reported this.

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

Gone are the days that kids building rockets, jets, and blowing stuff up is considered normal and encouraged, or at least tolerated with stern warnings. There have been far too many stories involving those subjects ending up very poorly for young people when the law gets involved(a friend of my wife got a felony conviction for experimentation). People see it as a threat and something that should be punished, but forget that that is how many people got into science and engineering, especially those involved in the early NASA programs. I have luckily managed to be smart enough about my more questionable experiments so as to avoid this very issue coming up. It feels wrong to know that some of the things I've done that have taught me a great deal about science and engineering carry with them a potential for jail time.

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

To be honest & only knowing the story over the internet, I am not sure the English teacher did anything wrong. Doesn't everybody carry around dual function bomb/alarm clocks? :) The administration and the police however way overreacted. At least the police had the common sense to admit it and drop it.

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

Hey, NASA has reached out:

Chris Hadfield ‏@Cmdr_Hadfield (NASA Astronaut)

Hi @IStandWithAhmed ! I'd love you to join us for our science show Generator in Toronto on 28 Oct. There's a ticket waiting for you.

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

Especially when it's white males that are the perpetrators of school place violence.

It also come down to zero-tolerance policies that removes administrators common sense from the equation.

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

I’m a grown man and this whole situation is so infuriating on so many levels that it makes me just want to cry because I am so ashamed of the level of racism, islamophobia, fear, and just plain ignorance, stupidity, and absurdity in this country.

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

QFT.

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

Look how far we have come.
I was on the high school shooting team and I had a rifle at the school.
Recruit this student.

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

FIRST... Invite this kid to champs!

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

I've found a Twitter account and a Facebook page for 3370, but their listed website address is down and neither social media account has seen any activity since 2012.

Does anyone have any current contact info so that we can tip them off? (assuming, of course, that they haven't had the same idea already)

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

They're already on it!

https://twitter.com/FIRSTweets/statu...27180210319360
https://twitter.com/FIRSTweets/statu...50066413293568

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

High school Trap shooting teams have become very popular lately in MN. But all related activities are done at shooting ranges, off school property.

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

From the news story:

Somebody in TX find a way to contact him, his science (not English) teacher, or the principal.

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

There is also Team 5786 in Irving.
http://unhprobotics.co.vu/

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

Rest assured, there are a few things in the works to try and get him involved.


Greg

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

Thanks, Astronaut Chris Hadfield!
Thanks FIRST headquarters!
and, not sarcastically, "Thanks, Obama!"

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

Good work Chris, Mr. President and FIRST! Thanks for lighting the fire Greg!

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

The police should know how to tell if it is a movie bomb... you pull the red wire and it stops at 00:00:01

I mean, that's why evil doers put clocks on their bombs, isn't it... so that the good guys know when to pull the red wire?

Mind you, should I ever become a super villain, I'm setting all my bombs to explode at 00:00:02.

Jason

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

That's hilarious, and awesome. Reminds me of the Nuts for Jericho campaign. I would love to see this take off in that way. If you really get the internet behind something and it takes off, you'd have enough sent over there to where every kid in the whole school district could build one!

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

I was talking with one of his friends on Facebook tonight (of course I shared this thread with him), and it sounds like they'll be looking to join an FTC team (I told him to contact the FIRST Senior Mentor Joe, so if you want them, better talk to Joe :D)!
Also thought I'd share what his friend told me about him (hope he doesn't mind, but it made me smile and restored my hope in humanity, which isn't that what FIRST is about?): "He's really good at engineering and robotics, he would always come up to me and we would talk about what he was working on, I really don't have the tools to do that, my soldering gun broke, But I do love learning about it."

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

So just a couple of things that have happened today.

* We offered him a free membership to the Dallas Makerspace (we have a 17,000 sqft facility with everything you could imagine and 1,000 members.

*He was offered some free parts from at minimum AndyMark and REV (maybe others but I have no direct knowledge)

*I reached out to him and invited him to come visit 2848 ( I can't offer him a direct spot on the team as the administration would need to be involved but I am hopeful he considers our school if he transfers from his own)

We do want him to land on a team this year, but alot depends on what school he lands at. There are some options for starting new teams this year (FTC or FRC) but as many of you know there is alot that goes into that type of commitment. I feel confidant that we can get their registration covered if it is a new team, but I think it is likely he might land at a school which is already covered.

I personally would like to still form a team of some type at his existing (old school) as there is a cultural change that needs to happen there and having a team there would help with that quite a bit assuming there is enough interest.

I also know that he was offered a trip the Maker Faire in NYC next weekend and a trip to the White House (which he has accepted). I am sure there have been many other offers to help and that personally he will be fine. The main thing we all need to take away from this is that no matter how good many of us have it inside our own STEM celebrating communities, there are loads of places where students don't have an outlet. When your teams are planning community events and demos I urge you all to make sure that you consider doing demos for people who have little exposure to this kind of thing and make education and acceptance part of your message in addition to talking about your team. While many of us laugh at the notion that what he made was interpreted as a Bomb, we may be in the cultural minority. Just remember this is FOR INSPIRATION AND RECOGNITION OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.

I am proud to be part of this community that is so quick to help people in need, but lets use this incident as a spring board to continue our goals of culture change.

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

I don't mean this as a dig at you, as I think what you're doing is great, but the culture change they need is to stop seeing any non-white person as a terrorist. It's got nothing to do with being more aware of STEM activities.

The problem isn't that they couldn't figure out he had a clock and not a bomb...it's that they saw a brown kid with both "Ahmed" and "Mohamed" in his name and freaked out because they're either subconsciously or outwardly racist/Islamophobic.

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

Not to disagree with your analysis of the thinking (or lack thereof) behind these events, but I will suggest that gracious professionalism includes a lot more than just STEM. FIRST does a pretty darn good job of cultivating an inclusive, supportive environment for everyone.

Jason

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

I agree with you 100% about the racial issues at play here and while I agree with you that those are the much bigger ones to solve. Unfortunately I don't think that I am qualified to be the one working to proactively change people's minds in that regards. I will support those efforts how I can, but that is a situation where I will follow but can't lead (besides by example of my personal actions).

On the other hand technical mentoring and training is something that I can help with, and where I feel like my efforts can have a bigger impact.

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

Ok, so when I first heard about this story I was totally behind this kid. Then I actually saw a picture of his clock...



So, I'll still think basically anyone who looked at this for more than 30 seconds should have been able to recognize that this was not, in fact, a bomb. That said, I think, had it been me, I would have found a different way to house the electronics. The metal "briefcase" was... less than ideal.

[/2cents]

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

The housing is just a pencil case. Its pretty much the ideal housing for a small electronics project that a high school freshman complete in less than a day...

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

Do you think that all those invites should also be going to the administrators? Sounds like they are the ones that need some education.

In other news I googled "movie bombs" and got a list of box office theatre failures. Is that what they are supposed to look like? :)

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

The picture is deceiving in relation to the size of the case. it's 8.25" x 5.5" x 2.5" not really "briefcase" size. Its major dimensions are smaller than a sheet of paper (actually about half the size).

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

Yep, I sent 5 kits worth, lets hope they get to someone and not the trash.

Right it is a makeup case that you can get online or at Target. I have a pair of them. One has Arduino stuff in it (board, shields, cable, power brick, etc.) and the other has the stuff for a Raspberry Pi demo. They are small, sturdy and come in colors. (Blue is Arduino since the board is blue). They can bang around in the back of the car and not damage the electronics.

1/2 of the effort in any electronics project is trying to find a case, getting knobs mounted and labeled so it all looks nice. He took the time to put the school mascot on it. Evil Geniuses don't do that (ok,maybe a "shark with laser sticker", but never Left Shark)

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

So closed it looks like a little case. Not pressure cooker in a backpack. Open there is clearly no explosive or shards of metal that you would into a bomb. Maybe the electronics took up too much room? :]

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

I don't know why I didn't think of this when I started this thread, but for Heaven's sake don't let him join FRC Team 16!:rolleyes: :yikes:

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

You mean the Clock Squad?

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

Team 16 totally needs to send him a tee shirt!! Wear it with pride to the white house.

Disclaimer: I am totally unrelated to Team 16 other than being an admirer of their program. I understand they are discrete as to where they wear their "Bomb Squad" tee shirts.

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

What I’m trying to figure out is how the alarm on the clock went off in his backpack during his 6th period English class. The clock appears to be the AC powered innards with a 9VDC plug for battery backup. If it was in his backpack how was it plugged into the wall?

I am assuming he didn’t actually design/build a clock from scratch but rather assembled parts and pieces from one or more consumer alarm clocks (possibly broken) and put them together in this case and made them work. No matter what he did: design and build a clock from scratch, put broken pieces together, buy a clock kit somewhere online and solder it up, or whatever, I applaud him for good old fashioned inquisitiveness and creativity. His actions should be celebrated not punished. Back when I was a kid I had a habit of “taking things apart to see how they work”. This was encouraged behavior. If something was broken like an alarm clock, a microwave, a TV, a tape deck, a movie projector, etc. I always got to tear into it before it hit the trash. What happened to those days? When did this become something that would get you arrested for attempting to make a “hoax bomb”? Oh wait, I’m sorry, I forgot, I was a white kid.

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

Yeah, at first I thought that it was a miracle that I had never been arrested for something like this when I was a student. Then I thought about it... His skin color, his religion, and his name should not determine the severity of the punishment he received. He should not have been punished at all for this. Real bombs don't beep.

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

While i don't deny that skin color, name,... played an issue. Rigid policies, zero tolerance, embedded resource officers (police) have led to lot of silliness in school discipline - for everybody.

On the other side of the coin. He has received a ground swell of support.

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

I expect that it had a nine volt battery connected while it was in his backpack. I also expect EOD removed it to safe the device.

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

True indeed. Kids like that deserve support.

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

I bet a FIRST team full of foreign kids building amazing things and getting exciting about engineering would help the situation. Helping people relate to those they are prejudiced against is a good step.

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

Something that hasn't been clear...if they actually thought this was a bomb, why didn't they evacuate the school?

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

Just shows the silliness of the schools position. They knew it wasn't an working bomb. Best case for them would be he intended to create a disturbance. Apparently no evidence of that either. It is a good thing it wasn't cold & Ahmed was wearing a down vest. No telling where he would be now.

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

They knew it wasn't a real bomb. In their narrative, they were dealing with a kid who brought a fake bomb to school, and who wouldn't tell them why he built a fake bomb.

They treated him as uncooperative because he "...would only say that it was a clock and was not forthcoming at that time about any other details." I'm not sure what other details they expected, given that it was a clock.

Hey, you know what else is a clock?

It's all cleared up now, except for the part where the authorities don't apologize, and the part where the school administration reminds everyone that hoax bombs are still prohibited. Oh, and the part where the local government officials do nothing to take back their recent smears against Muslims.

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

That's quite the bomb there, Alan! Also, I subbed in for my boss on his golf team yesterday. I hadn't golfed in almost two years. I did okay, but out of it I found my wrist bomb I lost two years ago in my golf bag.

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

Where we are at that since schools have been successfully sued, they have moved the tasks normally assigned to a harried Vice-Principal to the police. They have instituted a simple framework that says "anything out of the 99.99% norm, stop them and hand them over to the police (or what ever the police in schools are called in your area "community outreach officers"). You all have "school policy" documents that say this and you all (students and parents) recently signed one giving most of your rights away.

Sadly the students in the school are taking the brunt of this, which I feel bad about. They have the world looking on them going "Really?" Which is sad. I'm sure they have heard from all their social media friends about how it must be bad to go to such an idiot school.

I'm happy that everyone has reached out to the kid, but a better ploy would be "hey your school is lacking in uber geeks, let us help create more in your school. Here is money, people, clock kits, etc to help you up the way cool STEM ladder." Just think of the difference Mark Z could make coming to the school and speaking vs having one kid come on the Facebook campus.

The school is stuck. While they will most likely be sued, for them to say "Ok, we were wrong, sorry"; will only make it worse for them in court. ISD board same boat, stuck in a corner. Irving PD, stuck, stuck, stuck. While the public shaming has been bad, their deeper fear of them paying multi-million in judgements has them continuing to double down.

BUT THERE IS A GOOD SIDE. Now is the time for all of YOU to go to your schools and go:

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

Heh... Thanks for the idea :D Just sent the idea onto the coach of Bomb Squad :D

Also, I chatted a bit with FIRST HQ, and they are also reaching out, so it sounds like they at least will be joining FIRST :D Wouldn't it be cool if he could get on an FRC team with his friends who sound like they're taught by incompetent teachers?!?! Yet somehow they are named National AP District of the Year and “Top Digital District” for Use of Cutting-Edge Technology

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

This is an important discussion to have, and I'm really proud of our FIRST and Robotics community for having it.

The one point I disagree on is the bashing of Ahmed's teachers. I'm in my second year teaching, and it's ridiculous how difficult it is sometimes to actually teach my content when there's so many other things happening on a daily basis. Every teacher that I've come in contact with for the past two years of my career always has the best interests at heart for their students. Sometimes that manifests in drastically different ways.

I don't blame Ahmed's teachers. The teachers are part of a larger institute that needs to take responsibility, including administration and police. But I'm slow to point fingers at the English teacher. There's very few of us silly non-STEM English teachers in the world who even know what an Arduino even is.

So yes, let's educate. (I'm educating my co-workers regularly about STEM and Robotics), but please let's also do so in a way that doesn't bash the teachers, who have enough on their plate at the moment.

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

This is a really good point. As the pace of change for technology accelerates, it is up to us in the engineering tribe to educate those not in it about the wonders that are out there. My mom is a retired English/Language Arts/Social Studies teacher and I'm happy to say she is still learning new stuff, even today. She probably couldn't pick out an Arduino from a Raspberry Pi but she knows her way around an iPad and understands that microcontrollers are what make it all possible.

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

I don't mean any harm, but you guys need to do more research on a story before making all these presumptions or suggesting such drastic measures. The issue, to me, isn't that he built a clock that looked like a stereotypical IED. (Which he most likely knew it did, and brought it to school anyways. But let's be honest, a lot of harmless electronic projects can easily look like IED's to an untrained eye), but that he didn't actually build the clock from scratch, let alone "invent" it like he claims. What he brought to school was, or at least appears to be, something built in a factory. This video demonstrates and explains this in detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=232&v=CEmSwJTqpgY
Even if it was something he invented, which I don't believe it is, he doesn't deserve thousands of dollars worth of gifts and a free trip to the white house. There are plenty of other kids that have done so much more than him, and I wouldn't even say they deserve free stuff. It's a nice just but it's also not a fair gesture. I don't think anyone deserves special treatment like that unless they did something really impressive, like those kids who innovate in medical, technological, and other scientific fields in a way that can potentially help society as a whole. Kids like that deserve a lot of recognition but almost always get little-to-none, while this kid who just, at best, built a simple electronic clock has gotten massive amounts of media and political attention.
There's also the possible issue with his uncle, Aldean Mohamed [his Twitter] being CEO of a company named "twin towers transportation" [http://www.corporationwiki.com/p/2fj...on-corporation] which is obviously provocative, but that's no fault of Ahmed Mohamed. He isn't responsible for his family's actions. Even if he had (not saying he does have, just saying if he did) a terrible family, we shouldn't judge him for that. Just like we shouldn't consider him a hero just because of what happened to him, even though I do believe he was wronged at first. But our school system wrongs A LOT of people, and the teachers are probably required to call the police of they see something that looks similar to a bomb on a student, regardless of race or creed. Rewarding him may be with good intentions and is sentimental, but it's ultimately unfair and unreasonable.
There may have been racial profiling involved, but there's no proof of it. It's fallacious to just assume racial profiling is what happened in this situation, even if you personally think it's probable (Which I agree that is is a high possibility, there is a lot of Antisemitism in our country. But it's still wrong to assume that this is the case). Situations like this have happened many times before, so it's not like it's exclusive to Mr. Mohamed, or Muslims at all. (though it's stupid that they didn't evacuate the school, that should be standard protocol with a bomb threat. But that's how our school system typically is, dumb and constantly takes extreme measures against kids who usually didn't actually do anything wrong)

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

He has never claimed that he invented what he made but he still built it. Most students don't do the kind of things that he did. I personally can say that I wish I did the things that he does but I just don't put the time in.

Maybe other people have done more to deserve the recognition he has gotten but the price he has paid is being arrested for something that he did not do. And that seems very likely that he was racially profiled for.

If someone really thought what he brought in was a bomb; why didn't they stop touching/handling it, evacuate the school, and call the bomb squad? Saying it is just stupid they didn't evacuate the school is an understatement. Based on the response of the school district and how they want to protect all of the students they serve, they failed that objective when the first idea that it was a bomb came up and they didn't get the students away from it.

If anyone had any common sense and believed it to really be a bomb the first thing to do to protect the "All students" would have been to evacuate the school. The story of the school and the police don't add up to someone truly believing that there was some type of bomb threat.

He really seemed to be racially profiled to me because when he insisted that it was a clock the police were still called. When the police interviewed him they kept asking what it was and he always had the same response: "It is a clock". Why did the police keep asking? If someone gives you one answer constantly to the same question you ask over and over again, isn't it a pointless question?

Also by the definition of a bomb that the school/police went by literally includes all electronic devices. So phones, calculators, clocks, watches, ipods, ipads, computers, etc.

You make a lot of statements counting them as fact when they truly are not. And as an anonymous account on this forum you really don't get much credit.

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

I'm not sure if he himself claimed he invented it, it might have just been mainstream media saying that, but his father did say that to reporters and also had inconsistencies in the story. Like saying to CNN that “it was an alarm clock that he made. He wakes up with it most mornings,” and then later saying on Dallas News he made the clock in 20 minutes the night before taking it to school.

I didn't put much emphasis on the bomb threat because that wasn't a concern of mine, I just addressed it since it was a major part of why people have been taking sides. I myself think the school overreacted, but again, being wronged doesn't mean you deserve anything. Let alone what he got. My point wasn't that there are people who deserve reward more than him, my point was that people don't deserve rewards for being wronged. Let alone thousands of dollars worth of rewards and a free trip to the white house. Those should be things that are earned, not given to you because something bad happened to you.

I feel the same way about the families of, for example, 9/11 victims' families, who were given millions of dollars of tax payer's money in return for their lost one. They didn't need, let alone deserve, that money, which could have been used for rebuilding the city or for people who DID need it. They did deserve any sort of life insurance that they may have had with that family member, but what was given to them wasn't this and was just wasteful, unfair charity.

"You make a lot of statements counting them as fact when they truly are not."
Tell me which statements I made that were like this.
Also, "as an anonymous account on this forum you really don't get much credit." is fallacious. Popularity=/=credibility. Additionally, I'm not anonymous. Daisies is the handle I use for everything, when it's available, and I'm not hiding my identity or location.

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

Forgot to respond to these 2 statements in my last reply.
First of all, that is a standard police practice that they use as a way to find inconsistencies in someone's story. They ask the same questions over and over again to see if you ever change your answer, and if you do change you answer (which happens a lot, sometimes even with people telling the truth who just slip up), they use that against you. It's not considered evidence, but it's still an inconsistency that can be used against you if the case goes to court.

Second of all, I was talking about devices with open wires, "motherboard" and timer inside a case. To an untrained eye, it looks like a barebones (without explosive components) case bomb. In the context of what happened, it seems like there was racial profiling involved (on the school's end. Makes no sense that they didn't take any of the necessary actions during a bomb threat, but still claim that they thought it was a bomb) but everyone was jumping to this conclusion before we knew any of this, and even know we shouldn't assume everyone involved was racially profiling him. It's likely that a couple of people were, but extremely unlikely that a majority of them were. From what we know about the story, the police took standard protocol. One of the officers, according to some media sources, made dumb comments, but that doesn't mean the rest agree with him. (I believe they say he said "That's who I was expecting", which looks like it's a racially charged comment, but it could have easily been taken out of context. I'm suspicious of that officer, but I'm not going to judge him until I know all of what he said.)

In closing, I would hesitate to make conclusive statements on the situation itself (I was more-so talking about things surrounding the actual situation, like the rewards and the way people/mainstream media has reacted) until all the evidence is gathered and apparent. Until that time, we can only participate in conjecture. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but hopefully a sufficient amount of concrete evidence is provided soon to make things more clear. I'm not judging the boy, just pointing out the possibility that he was acting like a typical mischievous teenager (and if it turns out that's the case, then I would judge him. But there's no evidence to support this. He certainly doesn't look like a mischievous boy, but looks can be deceiving). The only thing I'm judging is the people who are rewarding him and labeling him as a hero.

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

News Agencies sometimes over simplify facts to make the story simple. Honestly it doesn't really make a difference how long he had the clock if it was a day or a year.

I think the gifts and other things he has gotten are ways for people show their support. They want to make it extremely vocal what happened is wrong and what he is doing (being interested in STEM) is cool. If you don't think he should have gotten I have nothing more to say.

UNFAIR CHARITY?!?
I have literally nothing say about this except, WOW.
9/11 victims families were people who actually needed it.

So what is your name then? Are you on an FRC team or other FIRST team?

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

Daisies, you appear to be a CD troll, with your only three posts in the last few hours all getting negative responses. While opposing views on CD are welcome, I don't think your writings are. But as all things CD, I'm going to take you at face value.

I'm not going to go back and attempt to refute your points by a point by point response. I will respond to main part of your "ideas"

-- Family and their activities in the Muslim community. Yay for them. They are devout Muslims and are doing things to protect their faith. The father tried to stop a Florida "minister" from doing a mass burning of the Koran (the equivalent of Christianity Bible). This isn't the 1500-1600's and the Crusades. Who / what / when they worship is up to them. I worship the "Sourcebook of Electronic Components"

-- It's a RadioShack clock, not something he built. Who cares? I've left a huge swath of disassembled radios, TVs, high voltage neon signs, computers, two and four stroke engines both gas and diesel equipment, and who knows what of junk components from electronic recyclers. Some of it got repurposed, some of it was junked after I learned about it, some more I paid serious dollars to get it reassembled and working. ALL OF IT WAS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE. He's 14, there are posts saying "Well when I could first crawl I took apart grandma's TV. Good for them, good for this kid at 14, he's trying to learn. The 28 year old lit teacher also had a learning experience. You are never too old to take stuff apart. Get a butter knife out and take your laptop apart right now!!! Learn something!

-- The school got into their "Zero Tolerance Policy" roadmap where all destinations are Failtown. "It's beeping. What is that? It's a clock. Ok, shut it off and sit down." One possible path. The path they took was "What is that? It's a clock. Looks like a bomb. Shut it off and when class is over we will start the process of `bringing things to school that do not have school district numbers' ". Which all end up with police action.

The school called the police from a town that has an avowed Muslim hater as a Mayor. Four officers show up and question a 14 year old boy, without his parents, a lawyer for 3 hours about a clock. After that, hand cuffed (for his safety!!) and transported to a detention center to be photographed and fingerprinted.

-- Treasures heaped upon this student. People heard and did individual things. It wasn't a coordinated effort. The President invited him to come to the Whitehouse. And while people are out there going "Of course, our Muslim President is helping a Muslim kid (false, the president is a Christian) I look at it as more of a geek President is helping a geek kid.

Facebook, Apple, Intel, etc, etc "Come see us". Easy to do for them. I'd rather see them come to the school and present to the TEACHERS on how cool geeks can be and the geek tech we use. Come present to students that geeks that have made their lives better come in multiple shades of skin colors, multiple religions, multiple countries, multiple sexual preferences and are all "people". But it appears that I don't tell them what to do and it's not my money.

In "Foster World" (tm) this would have been handled differently. In this Earth timeline it was handled poorly. They could have taken all that money, time and future effort to reach out to more future roboteers.

-- Lastly, please don't visit my house. My workbench is covered with devices with wires all over, flashing LED in both lights and 8 segment display formats. Lots of the stuff is mounted in Sugru, a white Playdo like substance that looks a lot like movie C4. The stuff is great for building little containers for small circuits until I win Powerball and can buy a 3D printer.

-- Summary: Kid new to ripping things apart does a project and takes it to school. School invokes "Zero tolerance == Zero Success cause we dump stuff on the police". Police handle the situation badly. World sees and tries to right a single injustice.


It catches Daisies eye, since it's tech related, but if they would Google search "other screwed up thing in the world" they will find a litany of "Wow is that going on?" things in the world and see that other people are trying to fix other things. We all pick the stuff that we think is wrong and try to fix it.

I'm a robotics Mentor. I'm trying to improve my small corner of this Earth Timeline. There is way too much broken things in this timeline. If you have time Daisies to complain about how other people are making a difference, it's clear that YOU are not working hard enough to make a difference. I run my test "is it helping?" In this case one kid, and since I deal in the "one roboteer success" program, they pass, so I turn back to my job as a Mentor.

Good luck Daisies on helping the world.

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

Slight nitpick: Chris Hadfield is a CSA astronaut... Hence why he would be doing a show in Toronto. AFAIK out of all CSA astronauts over the years, he's the most accomplished (even getting to be commander over an ISS Expidition).

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

With respect we should be careful about making such accusations. The teacher(s) may have been confused. It may be zero-tolerance school policy to call the police (also maybe a bad idea but made by the school board not the teachers, counselors and principals). Then the police dropped it (though not nearly as quickly as they should have).

The one thing we can report, from the facts, is that the mayor's statement was ridiculous and *phobic. And we can conclude that many kids of all races and religions get in trouble at school for silly stuff (chewing pop-tarts into the shape of a gun etc).

This student was the victim of a huge injustice. But I blame the bureaucracy!

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

Actually it looks nothing like an IED except the kind you see in the movies. No explosives, shrapnel, or bomb casing (like pressure cooker). Closed it looked like a nondescript case. Which looks more like an IED than the wires since IEDs should be nondescript, Our robotics lab is currently a mess. it has circuit boards and wires all over the place. Some of which would make effective bomb timers. We also have air rifles in the same place, but that is a different story.

As far as the school goes, I don't think the teacher did anything wrong. Something you have questions about, send to the administration. The administration is handicapped a little because privacy laws prevent them from telling their side the story. (Student may have made previous threatening statements, etc ), Legitimate bomb threats/hoaxes are serious business. I have no reason to think that was the case here, this in an hypothetical. I do know if my child was suspended based on the evidence in the media, if this could not be resolved peacefully, the school would be talking to lawyers.

I agree. Ahmed is reportedly Muslim. Antisemitism isn't the right phobia.

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

QFT.

I used to work for a company that makes countermeasures for IEDs. They look like garbage or backpacks (or cars) and are not put into hard cases. They don't have timers with giant cartoonish LCD displays. The electrics are made using cell phones as remote triggers, not AC coils and 9V batteries.

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

So when you say "QFT == Quoted for Truth", you quoted both paragraphs.

This paragraph, I have a real problem with:

The paragraph starts out with "send it to the administration". Spend a few Google seconds to find the MacArthur High School School Policy. Spend a few minutes reading it. You will find that most things that have to do with "not conforming to the rules" end up with the police. I refer to these policys as "Flow charts to Fail". You should now Google your school policy and see how many things quickly get dumped into the police process.

It wasn't a legit bomb threat. She stuffed the "bomb" into a drawer. She then carted the "bomb" to the administration. The "bomb" set on their desk until the police arrived. The police questioned the student with the "bomb" present. So I'm going to take a wild stab and think that nobody thought it was a "bomb".

The last part, "talking to lawyers" is how we got into this mess. Because people sue and school districts had to pay out lots of money, they now dump everything to the police. Days of a Vice Principal yelling at your child for being a cheesehead (*) are long gone. So if you can say "I'd sue" you get the "Flow chart to fail" as your reward.

So if you QFT, make sure what you are "QFT" is truth and not something else.


The word you want is "Islamophobia". And since we are learning new words today try "Christianophobia" it is the extreme fear of Christians or the Christian faith. And in honor of the Pope arriving in the US, let's add "Catholic-phobi" is fear of, hostility towards or opposition to the Catholic Church.

Don't confuse any of them with "Cathisophobia", since it is the fear of sitting down and also is otherwise known as "Thaasophobia".

(*) Fourth generation Packer fan here, I can use the word cheesehead.

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

Hasty quoting. Not that I agree/disagree but not what I meant to do. Fixed.

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

I've seen several teams that were completely non-white-male, including an all-girls' team from Hawaii at the Wisconsin Regional one year and several teams from the Israel Regional and the Mexico City Regional in St. Louis. I'm so glad I got to go that year (although watching Will.I.Am try to freestyle was atrocious).

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

How did you and I come from the same hometown? Has Kenosha gotten that bad?

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

The fact of the case is you're ignoring some facts. Everything I've read says the teacher kept the clock in their desk all day. the school didn't over react! They did the exact opposite of what that should have done. They should have called the police and evacuated if they did the correct procedure.

The biggest issue with this is the fact the whole thing was judged on a CASING!

If you take the casing off of every electronic device, the jumble of wires on an iPhone looks more like a bomb than an alarm clock would look. The clock was inside of a pencil case. when you opened the pencil case, you saw an LED display for the clock and 2 or 3 wires. If it was an explosive, they would have seen packs of explosives somewhere in there. The whole fact of the matter is as soon as the clock was shown to her, she should have gotten rid of it as soon as possible and the school should have been under a code red. The reason people keep reaching out to him with gifts is because he was wronged by the school system and the school system was wronged by the under reaction of the teacher. The best thing for the police to have done at the time was taken him into custody and figure out the situation. They did their job. This case is just a very weird case... period.

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.

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

In accordance with proper FEMA bomb threat procedure

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

Interesting. I've never seen that. But I feel like it doesn't apply to the situation of this case. If this teacher actually thought that clock was a bomb and since it was in her possession, I feel like that checklist would then become invalid. One of the steps is tell them not to evacuate the building until the police arrive to evaluate the threat. If the teacher actually thought it was a bomb, she or he would have known the severity of the level is very high. That's when you evacuate the building without touching base with the police. Now if the teacher thought it was a hoax bomb, that's a whole other story and what the teacher did was right for that day. If the teacher thought it was a hoax bomb from the beginning, then the teacher was just too dumb to actually look into what the mechanisms actually looked like.

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

And what does the FEMA bomb threat procedure have to do with this?

This page has the Student Conduct Guide for the 2015 School year It's their rule book. Not FEMA.

There is also an adjunct guide for School Board Policys

The first document is a 50 page "guide" with an ironic slogan "Where Children Come First" on it.

I'm not willing to go with the "it was a hoax bomb threat." The teacher continued to teach, she kept the clock with her and after class they went to the office. He has given a number of interviews about what happened and the flow of the day.

I have to say that the list of things you can be expelled for is pretty intense:

Yikes! But again, he said it was a clock. He never called a threat in, only the teacher said that they thought it was a bomb.

But then lets look at the glossary to make sure we didn't miss anything.

No, it was a clock.
No, this didn't happen either. Even the teacher can't say "Place a person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury" since she stayed and finished the class.

From what we know from the news reports and what he's said on the news.
-- It wasn't a bomb threat, since they did none of the activities that would occur around a bomb threat.
-- It wasn't a "hoax bomb" threat, since there wasn't any of the activities that would be around even a "hoax bomb"

We don't know the ISD side, and my guess is that until the trial, we never will. And actually I'm going to guess that we will read in a few weeks "The ISD reached a settlement today, neither party was willing to comment".

What we can all agree on is the Irving School District, and most school districts across the U.S. have "Zero tolerance" policy's that are a flowchart to fail by dumping issues onto the police. Which we know from this case that these things rapidly spiral out of control.

To all of you that said in different words, "not a big deal": Explain to me why I'm seeing pictures of a 14 year old student in handcuffs. Explain how a "clock" gets to the point of handcuffs. Put together a story, based on what's out there in the reported news, how it got to having him in handcuffs. Don't go dumpster diving into FEMA suggested procedures or what Home Land Security or the The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers would do. They put a 14 year old student in handcuffs for bringing a clock to school.

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

AFAIK, the teacher did NOT think it was a bomb. They thought it was a hoax bomb. I talked about the implicaitons of that on the last page.

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

Ok but even at that, the kid never said it was a bomb and it was dumb if her to take it that far. All it did was beep and it was in a pencil case! Of course we don't know some details but it is ridiculous on so many levels it seems from what the news covers

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

The student was not expelled. He was never in danger of being expelled. I've not seen this in any media stories about this incident. What are you talking about?

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

Student brings disassembled old alarm clock to school in a small case.
Student shows device to engineering teacher who tells him to not show it to anyone else.
"Clock" alarm goes off and student takes it out again.
English teacher confiscates the "clock", does not know what it is but that it is not a bomb.
English teacher, obeying policy and procedure, gives device to school administration.
School administration wonders why a kid brings this to school and, obeying policy and procedure, calls the police.
Police arrive and student will not answer questions, other than state it is a clock, and does not cooperate. (to me this is weird, why not open up to the police)
Police, following policy and procedure, cuff the student and take him to the station. Reminder - to be a hoax the object must only arouse the suspicion of an "authority figure", the kids intention does not matter. And nobody gets in the back of a police cruiser w/o being cuffed.
Police, following policy and procedure, decide the kid, though uncooperative, is no danger to himself or anyone else.
Police release student.

Now it may come out that student was treated poorly somewhere along the line. There may be a racist element somewhere though it is not obvious. Many students get in trouble for all kinds of weird things. But I'm betting it is just bureaucracy run amok.

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

Your interpretation hinges on the administration having to report the clock to the police. I won't claim to know for certain, but I don't think a Zero Tolerance policy applies to any electronics brought into a school. I think the administrators / teachers HAD to believe that Ahmed brought a hoax bomb to the school. They don't call the police for every piece of electronics brought to school.

The real question we need to be asking is why they thought he had intentionally brought a hoax bomb. And that question is much more likely to end in racism.

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

And that is the own teachers fault. If you look at the red digital display, it looks EXACTLY like the red display on my clock. Plus, it had numbers on it that read the same exact time as the teachers time on their computer. Anyone who owns an alarm clock can look at the display and immediately tell it is from a clock! It doesn't look like anything else! what else is in the format of "xx:xx"? nothing in this world except something to do with time. I will blame this on the teacher 100%. Forget the wires. Some defenses say that the teacher didn't understand the wiring. You don't need to understand the wires to tell it's a clock. If everyone had some common sense, this wouldn't have happened. And every clock makes the same exact noise for the most part. If you played a sound effect of that clock's noise, 99% of America could tell you it's a clock. I'm not trying to be rude. i'm trying to figure out how a teacher can be so stupid. maybe she didn't open it. I'm not sure. The whole situation was just dumb to begin with.

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

You are generalizing to make your point. I totally agree (whatever rules exist) should not apply to "any electronics" but it could readily apply to any "disassembled active electronics". How many students disassemble a working clock and bring it to school? I've been helping with robotics for 12 years and never seen a student do such a thing - all kinds of Arduinos and stuff brought to the meetings but never just take something apart and show it around school. I don't understand what the kid was doing nor do I assign any nefarious intent.

I'm thinking they concluded there was some tiny chance he intended for it to be a hoax. They didn't want to put their own jobs in jeopardy - bureaucrats trapped in a zero-tolerance framework. What I'm saying is they they let policy and procedure supplant common sense. It is hard to put ourselves in their position because we 1000% KNOW it was a clock.

The more I think about this I would have counseled the student to not show it around, just like his engineering teacher. But I may have kept it for him till he could pick it up on his way home - thinking some idiot may not know what this is and react poorly. 20/20 hindsight maybe...