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Safety Law News for 8/13/12

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  •  Michigan’s Dearborn Schools—which recorded 919 bullying incidents in the last school year—is an early adapter as a new state law requires all school districts to establish anti-bullying programs and policies.
  • Online behavior, or “cyber civics” is now taught at one California school. Among the students who started taking this course in sixth grade, no cyberbullying problems have surfaced since the course began.
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Safety Law News for 8/10/12

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  • People in Palm Beach County, Florida want to join Facebook and Twitter—and this is the school district talking. The district sees social media as ways to share information with the community, rather than treating online services primary methods of conversation.
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Safety Law News for 8/8/12

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  • When Pennsylvania policymakers realized that school districts could not hire SROs, they changed state law to permit SRO hires. When “kids recognize and have a relationship with [SROs, this] deters them from hanging out with the wrong crowd and reminds them to concentrate on their school work,” said state representative Tom Rock, who authored the bill.
  • Random drug tests may end at New Jersey’s Hillsborough High, where educators are not convinced that the tests are reducing drug abuse.
  • Minnesota educators and police collaborated to make a Twitter account non-public. It contained explicit and derogatory statements about local high school students.
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Safety Law News for 8/6/12

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  • In Chicago, boys in an anti-violence mentoring program have demonstrated a 44 percent drop in arrests for violent crimes and as much as a 23 percent increase in graduate rates.
  • Officer Tom Speece, a West Virginia SRO, was honored for stopping a student from bringing a shotgun to school. In presenting Speece with an award, the U.S. Attorney said that Speece has “built a level of trust with Ravenswood students that allowed him to find out about a problem before it turned into a tragedy, and he handled that problem superbly.”
  • Sagging pants and short skirts are the targets of a new dress code in North Carolina, where educators and students worked together to develop better policies on what students wear.
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Safety Law News for 8/1/12

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  • A kindergarten teacher ordered twenty-four students to line up and hit a six-year-old boy, who was also one of her students. She said he was a bully and needed to learn a lesson, but she is now on paid administrative leave.
  • After a third grade boy was accused of stealing $20, a female assistant principal strip searched him. The money was not in the boy’s clothing, and now, his mother says that educators went too far.
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Safety Law News for 7/30/12

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  •  Performance-enhancing Adderall is now a routine drug for students across the nation, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. One student calls it the drug for “good kids,” as many high school students turn to Adderall under the pressure of qualifying for Ivy League schools.
  •  When educators smelled alcohol and saw “some unusual behavior,” during a graduation rehearsal, the school and police administered Breathalyzers to every one of the 74 graduating seniors. The community is split over whether educators made the right decision: some parents are grateful, others are considering a lawsuit.
  •  Michigan’s State Board of Education is asking schools to reconsider zero tolerance policies that go beyond the law’s minimum requirements. Sheriff Michael Bouchard, previously a state senator, says he appreciates the desire to seek alternative punishments—and that, at the same time, “the first and primary duty is to have a safe school environment.”