One thing the school didn’t try. Take the computers away. If for some reason that didn’t work, try suspending the kids. They didn’t: they sent notes to their parents. Seems like a no brainer to me, but apparently going straight from a note to the parents to calling the police, filing criminal charges, and having the kids in jail is easier. Demerits, suspension, sure: time in jail, criminal record? Not. I didn’t notice anything in your response about going to jail if you used your work-provided computer to play Doom…I guess you would have been okay with that?

As for the kids “monitoring” administrators…there is nothing complex or tricky about that, or particularly “evil”. The schoolboard put software on the laptops so they could monitor the kids remotely. The kids figured out how this worked and used it to do the same thing to the IT administrators.

If the kids had hacked into some system, deleted/defaced/destroyed files, changed their marks, altered the teacher’s tests- I’d be on the schoolboards side in terms of pressing criminal charges. But what the kids did was roughly equivalent to sneaking into the teacher’s lounge and taking a cup of coffee from the coffee machine, then while you are there poking around in the magazines and stuff lying around on the coffee table.

As for the formatting- did you hit “return” at the ends of a few lines? The only place you should have to hit return is at the end of a paragraph. I think I fixed it, though