The “Break it Down” Blog

Let’s assume for a second that the facts are correct as stated here since that’s all I have to go on. The gist of the idea is that a teacher has computers in her class room for her underaged kids to use. It turns out that spyware had installed porn popups on the machines. Part of the problem was that the school-wide filtering software installation was not functioning because the subscription had expired. To boot, the teacher had reported the problem to administrators and had not received any help removing the spyware from the machines.

Guess what the result is? Parents sue saying that she is endangering minors and they win, she could get up to 40 years in prison.

If that’s not the icing on the cake, you all must realize by now what the solution to this problem is, right? That’s right… remove public computers from the class room.

If I was a teacher and this COULD happen to me because of some nefarious programmer on the web root-kitting my classroom computer or some kid browsing to some site he shouldn’t and saying yes to some ActiveX installer and now all the sudden I’m going to prison because of it… screw that, I would remove every single public computer from my class room and tell the parents if their kids NEED a computer, then buy one for them.

I come from a family chalk full of teachers and the one common theme from them all is that they hate their jobs because of the results that all these parent lawsuits have generated on the school system.

I’m not saying the lawsuits were bad, a vast majority of them were probably very valid and necessary… but I certainly think that this is a huge situation of “everyone suffers because of a few bad apples”.

What do you guys think? Is the teacher absolutely and inequivacably responsible for everything in her classroom even if the item is brought in or caused by another student, teacher, spyware, etc?