I agree that the school board is covering it’s but and that the actions involved are probably not “criminal”, but I also see the school board as stuck between a rock and a hard place… ( yes, they probably willingly put themselves there, but that still doesn’t make it easier to get out of the predicament.)

They probably have their curriculum set up so that students need to have these computers… removing the computers is not an option unless they intend to expell the students ( why didn’t thye? good question.) On the other hand, if they did nothing, and let the kids continue to do stuff with their laptops then what happens? Apple takes away all the computers? Their jobs are grass and with the rewriting of curriculum and extra expense a lot of kids educations are toast as well. The school board gets a nice lawsuit from the music industry for helping “steal” music, and spends half it’s funds on lawyers. Some kid gets molested or killed by some predator they met in a chat room… who will get blamed? Not the parents, not the kid, but the school.

You have some kids that even after repeated warnings aren’t playing by the rules, you have parents that don’t listen ( but will be the first to scream if something bad happens to little jhonny or little suzy.) To save the computers for the majority that are following the rules, the school board decided they had to take drastic action.

( Again, why they didn’t just expell the students is a good question… this is from a country that has expelled 6 year olds from hugging classmates to enforce a zero tolerance sexual harassment policy!)

The school should have thought about all this before they got the computers, but once they had them… their options are limited. As I say, short of expulsion, which for some reason wasn’t used, they seem to have tried everything they could. Criminal charges perhaps are out of line, but I also don’t think these kids are motivated by simple curiosity and a desire to learn how their machines work. The ones that have continued to break the rules, even after being suspended ( sure it might be a stupid suspension… but you and I and our parents would have found us a different school, not just decided it was “stupid” so we ignore it. ) These are kids / parents that cannot or will not get the point. They think that the rules don’t apply to them (stupid or not) and that they only have to follow ones they like and approve of. That the proper response to a rule you don’t like is to ignore it… not to fight to change it, not to leave in protest, but to just saw “screw it.” You say they had no bad intent, but without detailed information we don’t know that… I can say that anyone that persists in ingnoring repeated warnings including suspensions certainly is intent on something, even if it is only intent on being stupid. But I suspect that the hard core cases were NOT perfectly harmless. You empathize with the kids because you seem them as like you were at that age… well remember, I knew you at that age 😉 I’m pretty sure they aren’t like you.

( Which raises the question: Did the tech incompetent school admin actually tareget the right kids? Or just the easy to find ones? )

I pretty sure that the schools call the cops approach isn’t going to fix anything and will probably make it worse… but I’m not ready to call all the kids as “harmless” and tar and feather the the school based on what little we know either.