Tag Archives: students

Are Unpaid Internships Legal?

Looks about right

Internships offer college students and recent graduates a valuable way to gain experience in their fields of study. Regardless of how educational internships may be, they can be incredibly frustrating if they require the students to work for free.

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New Student IDs Track the Student’s Location

This tag is probably already in your dog.

Two schools in Texas have begun implementing a new form of student ID.  This “Identification Card” does much more than just provide a form of identification for the student, it actually tracks their current location. These ID cards are known as RFID’s, or radio-frequency identification cards.  RFID’s give school administrator’s the ability to see where the students are physically located at any given time of day.  This tracking program was started by the school district in an effort to keep the students in school and to reduce truancy.  People hope that this tracking program will increase daily attendance and lead the school district to save as much as $175,000.  This amount is lost daily due to low attendance from the students.  Higher attendance could also lead to an increase in state funding of up to $1.7 million.  Furthermore, this tracking program will increase student security and safety, increase attendance, grant access to various parts of the school, as well as influence purchasing power within the school.

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Handcuffs No Longer an Acceptable Punishment for Misbehavior in Mississippi Schools

The right to remain silent

One day in fourth grade, a kid in my class was misbehaving so atrociously that the teacher, in an act of desperation, enclosed him in a cardboard box on the ground for the rest of the afternoon.  At the time, it was hilarious, and it became a sort of mythical story that he and everyone else would tell well into high school and beyond.  You know, one of those jokes or memories that come up at a reunion.  Thinking about it, it was probably not the best way to treat a child, but he was being downright unruly.  I can understand that sometimes teachers just become so exasperated that they decide to break rules/morality to restore some order.  Not so in Mississippi, where, in a certain school district, it was all but encouraged to simply incapacitate out-of-line students as a first resort.

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