Parents are being encouraged to use drug-sniffing dogs on their kids.
Denver, CO - A special tool with four-legs and a talented nose typically used by police to take down suspects and find narcotics every day, is now available for parents to hire.
“It’s just a tool that parents can use to x-ray into their kid’s room and see what’s going on in a non-invasive way,” said Mark Haines, the owner of K-9 Force Security, a new company based in Ft. Collins.
Along with Storm, his two-year old German Shepard puppy, Haines offers parents the services of a drug-sniffing dog for a fee.
“Given a choice between dealing with the issue head on and honestly with your child, versus waiting two or three years down the road — dealing with addiction, maybe jail time, maybe worse… I’m choosing the drug search every time,” Haines said.
Storm has been trained to detect six major drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, heroin, psilocybin mushrooms, and even some opiate-based medications like OxyContin.
“It’s not very often that I get to train a dog as sociable as Storm,” said Joe Clingan, who has trained roughly 600 K-9 teams over a nearly 40-year career. He helped bring Storm up to speed. “He’s very direct and very methodical and accurate.”
When Storm enters a home, Haines guides him around, using the command “find the dope.” Once Storm sniffs out a narcotic, he simply sits down, looks at his trainer, and waits for a treat.
http://kdvr.com/2013/04/25/parents-can-hire-drug-sniffing-dog-to-see-if-their-kids-have-drugs/
Parents in New York are questioning inBloom, a massive student spy program:
The education data portal, inBloom, raised hackles this week among a group of New York City parents and educators who worry about the nonprofit’s plans to compile student information into a wide-ranging education data portal--and they’re organizing against it via email listservs, open forums and legislative bills.
Local community opposition to the inBloom plan was palpable on Monday (April 29) night in the Brooklyn Borough Hall at a "student privacy town hall meeting" devoted to the issue. Around 150 people gathered to express their frustrations and hear from New York Department of Education representatives. Holding handmade posters with slogans like “Our kids, not your data,” the group voiced unease about the creation of the portal, which many fear is gathering too much data about their children, will sell information to commercial vendors and will be vulnerable to hacking.
New York is one of eight states, including Illinois and Massachusetts that is participating in inBloom’s pilot tests this year before the software is rolled out more broadly. On April 19, Louisiana Department of Education Superintendent John White withdrew his state's participation in inBloom.
On Monday, the New York City DOE tried to allay fears by outlining the privacy and security laws (namely FERPA) that inBloom and other contracted vendors will have to follow when accessing student data. The DOE also talked up the portal’s expected benefits to students, parents and teachers, such as more personalized learning. But since the DOE had only one speaking representative at the town hall event, comments from parents and local officials dominated the meeting.
Those comments were occasionally shouted. Before the meeting even began, a Queens parent yelled to the crowd: “It’s an outrage, an outrage what’s happening here!”
He was referring to the fact that inBloom had not sent a representative and the two New York State representatives in attendance were there only as observers and would not take questions. Similar outbursts occurred throughout the event, often accompanied by applause. Leonie Haimson, a parent advocate and education activist who organized the town hall, says she invited inBloom and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which partly funded inBloom, but both declined to appear.
Haimson underscored those points in her presentation, which listed the many types of data inBloom could potentially assemble about a student, including race/ethnicity, disciplinary records and economic and disability status. Haimson also characterized data storage ‘in the cloud’ as risky. “This could damage our children’s prospects for life if it leaks out,” she asserted.
https://www.edsurge.com/n/2013-04-30-nyc-parents-raise-questions-about-inbloom
California is proposing a bill that would limit police involvement in arresting kids in schools:
As the national debate grows louder over deploying police in schools, the largest state in the union – California – is considering a bill that would require schools to set “clear guidelines” defining the role of school police and limit their involvement in disciplinary matters.
Last year, the Center for Public Integrity documented the ticketing of about 10,000 mostly black and Latino students a year, including middle-school-age children, in lower-income neighborhoods in the Los Angeles Unified School District. L.A. Unified is the nation’s second-biggest school district, and with more than 300 officers and additional security guards, it has the country’s largest district-controlled school police agency. At one point, school police were issuing about 1,000 tickets, or court citations, a month in 2011.
New York City police in schools, by comparison, issued 1,666 tickets to students during the entire 2011-2012 school year, according to records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is suing New York City police for alleged abusive treatment of students, which the department denies.
The Golden State joins Texas and Connecticut – home of the December Newtown school shootings – in considering legislation that would set limits on how schools involve police officers in discipline. Colorado adopted limits last year.
The U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights office reached a court-sanctioned agreement stemming from a federal investigation into alleged excessive involvement of police in discipline meted out in Meridian, Miss.
The agreement with the district of 6,100 students in Meridian essentially regulates school police on the district’s campuses. The district is required to train school police officers in “bias-free” policing and stop involving police in minor behavioral disputes in the majority-black district. Civil rights investigators said police in Meridian told them they were ferrying students to jail on allegations of defiance and disrespect at schools.
The proposals come amid burgeoning concern nationally over harsh school punishment policies, and police involvement in seemingly routine discipline. Police presence on campuses nationwide has grown steadily since two teens went on a killing spree at Columbine High School outside Denver in 1999. But a growing group of juvenile-justice researchers and judges argue that putting students into conflict with officers over minor infractions – and needlessly placing kids in the justice system – increases risks students will drop out and get into more serious trouble.
Since last December, lawmakers in various states and school administrators have rushed to fortify security in reaction to a young adult’s shooting rampage, which killed 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn. President Barack Obama and California’s own senator, Democrat Barbara Boxer, have urged appropriating money to schools that want to increase security.
California State Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a Democrat from Los Angeles, introduced the state school police bill, AB 549, to “get out in front,” he said, of the drive to put more security personnel in schools. A first hearing on the bill is set for Wednesday before the Assembly Education Committee.
California lawmakers are considering restricting other discipline practices critics say have become counterproductive, including suspensions that remove pupils from school for days at a time, often causing them to fall behind in classwork and leaving them unsupervised at home. The Assembly education panel recently approved a bill April 17 that would restrict out-of-school student suspensions and expulsions for “willful defiance,” the basis of almost half of all suspensions in 2011-2012, new state data shows.
http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/bill-seeks-limit-school-police-discipline-matters-18867