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:
Quote:
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"Hey we are tech nerds. We build all sorts of nerdy stuff that is really techy cool, like our robots (point at robot). Sometimes we have parts with us, think of it as pencils, paints and brushes for artists, musical instruments or sports equipment. You might look at a chunk of metal, black cans and wire and go "bomb", but it really is one of our awesome swerve drive wheels. So we are not trying to be disruptive, it's our cool stuff and we are excited and we want to share. Happy to fit under the zero policy, but we want our zero level to be at the same as paints, papers, hockey sticks, pom-poms, etc". Otherwise you will be in the center of a media storm that will not end for weeks and take all of us away from our biggest goal - education."
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