Slashdot Mirror
U.S. K-12 Schools Must Comply With e-Discovery Rule
Lucas123 writes "K-12 school districts throughout the US have a daunting
IT homework assignment over the summer: Develop systems that ensure their electronic documents, email and instant messages are in compliance with new federal e-discovery regulations, much in the same way corporations have been preparing over the past year. The new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are expected to be widely enforced by the end of 2007, according to a Computerworld story. '"A lack of preparation could prove dire for K-12 school districts, which oftentimes lack technical proficiency, funding and legal expertise," said Robert Ayers, technology coordinator for the Kingston, Pa.-based Luzerne Intermediate Unit 18 school district.'"
It is important to realize that these rule changes aren't just for schools - they apply to every company in the U.S..
So, for those of you who are the entire IT department where you work, or if you run your own business as a consultant, (or some similar situation), you might want to pay attention to what is required regarding email and IM retention under the new rules.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I am assigned to a committee to see how to implement these 'new' laws into our infrastructure. It's really amazing how incompetent these laws are. They require documents to be stored forever or to expire at a certain date, and as soon as it expires, nothing about the document is allowed to be found. So as soon as the document expires, somebody has to go through all backups, tapes, computers, usb sticks etc. and delete all traces of the document.
Not only is it near-impossible to implement, the only possible implementation would be a solution similar to DRM on media, which as we all know doesn't work, since you already have the content at that moment. Of course vendors like IBM and Microsoft would love to sell you their solution (that requires call-back to the central server which has to be accessible from both inside and outside the network (if you would like to use your documents elsewhere than within the office)) which not only costs a horrible amount of money, the implementation itself is flawed (as is any DRM-solution) and has so many requirements that managing and securing the solutions is going to be a major issue.
I think it's disgusting how companies and their lobby push for these impossible laws so they can sell their software.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Any Semi-intelligent person will use cleartext for official but non-confidential business at school and work, and encrypt any email or IMs that contain personal information or nefarious plans. If you are stupid enough to send something revealing over a public, corporate, or academic network, you DESERVE to get caught.
Hopefully as more and more people get caught for using cleartext, crypto will be the norm and all these laws requiring logging will become useless for law enforcement purposes.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Is it where K-9's go to get their training?
The only rational response to this 300 page regulation - not imposed, note, by any act of Congress - will be to delete immediately all emails upon reading (unless you are in an industry that already has requirements to store them). Good look for the historians of the future trying to decipher the history of the early 21st Century USA - the Courts required us to delete it.
I was wondering if someone could explain why this is in the jurisdiction of the federal government as opposed to the states. The schools are mostly state institutions. Is it the fact that the email 'crossed' state lines that makes all the difference? What if it is within one state? Does it matter where the severs are located?
Now I have visions of all these school kids being given ecstasy pills so that they can discover what drugs are about for themselves. When does the crack discovery program start?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
less the hard ware and soft where needed for something like this.
look at that substitute teacher who was facing 40 years for pron pop ups most likely if the School had more or better IT people / payed for the web filter / had some kind of firewall and anti-spyware protections then this may of not happened..
Oh, wait. It's not a company. It's a government...
It is becoming increasingly hard for small businesses to do any business these days. Not because they are being crowded out by the larger ones, but because one must higher several employees just to do all the paperwork required to run a business.
Now they have to log all electronic communication. Why? How is an email or test message any different than calling someone on the phone or meeting face to face? Will we have to bring a tape recorder to every meeting from now on? When will it end?
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
If your not a litigant in a federal court case, do these rules matter?
--fatboy
Rather than trying to archive everything, there is an important alternative, a data destruction policy. You can't discover what doesn't exist.
You just need to have the policy long in place before someone even thinks of suing you.
Test your net with Netalyzr
...the reasoning behind the provision about expiration? I understand how someone could think that keeping copies of all documents is a good idea (assuming someone who has the technical literacy of a lamp post, AKA avg. govt. worker) but I honestly don't understand where the expiration provision would come from.
Umm. I just completed a class on the constitution. It is amazing to me what the federal government has done (abuses started long before Bush). The Federal government was never given this level of "power" to force such crazy laws on the American people. Blame the supreem court for this.
We need a new political party. Its time that we did away with the democrat and republican stanglehold on the american people!
'Cause you need to log everything. Student sends an IM? Capture it. Board Member sends an email to 3000 users? Capture it. Sup. sends out virus infected email due to a, well, virus or worm? Log it. And, don't forget all of that inbound spam you are blocking, and all of the stuff you MAY be blocking outbound. Gotta log it FIRST.
Of course, you also need to have an INTERNAL POLICY that states WHO can see the archive, WHO can delete the archive, and who gets to define what the
archive is. A colossal waste of resources. And I work in this area as a consultant.
You can thank the lawyers (and un-aware staff/students sending questionable email, for wasting your school's budget.
(and no, you can't use E-RATE funds for this stuff, legally, at least).
Toil is Stupid. Don't be Stupid.
If you have the potential to be a litigant in a federal case, then they matter somewhat. More to the point, though, is that state laws generally follow the federal lead on rules of evidence, so expect most states to offer similar rules.
...and I'm going to just love seeing them trying to enact these requirements here.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Sounds like an opportunity for the open source community.
The average school in the US spends about 6K per student some of the schools you might consider poor (lets look at DC) spend upwards of twice that. 12K per kid per year that more than double what many elite private schools charge usually only 70% of that (not the kind with ponies and security teams where diplomats send their kids those are in a league of their own).
So when someone says our schools cant afford this or that I have to wonder when a class of 20 kids brings in a quarter million dollars (so a school of 2000 kids has a budget of 24 million dollars why the hell cant they afford it! and why can the private schools who charge 50 to 75% of your budget do what you can not?
And as for the software? its called squid and it does not cost a penny!
That article freaked me out. Sure, schools... it sounds like a tough situation for them -- but I hadn't even known this was happening for businesses.
I *am* a business. I have my own mail server. I don't think there's anything terribly interesting to the feds in there, but I'll be damned if I want them sniffing around my data!
Quick as a wink, I set up a script that purges and overwrites all stored email, every 5 minutes. Take that, G-man! I sat back in my chair with a satisfied grin.
10 minutes later, I checked for new messages.
Jesus people like you hurt my brain. Not because Karl Rove doesn't deserve a bashing (he does), but because you, and so, so, so many like you, are utterly fucking ignorant of 1) What the responsibility of the federal government is and 2) Where your taxes go. Sometime's I wish someone would submit the US Constitution as a Slashdot article, but no one RTFAs anyways (and I guess you're the ultimate proof of that.)
I despise the current administration as the next Libertarian, but get your facts straight about education funding. The federal government is not (and nor should it - look at how the "No Child Left Behind" crap flopped) responsible for funding K-12 education. If you want to complain about the misappropriation of funds to the Iraq War and the lack of science in our federal government, look at NASA, not the public school system.
Printz v. United States was the case that struck down major portions of the Brady gun-control bill. Appellants argued, and the court agreed, that the law's requiring state employees to engage in extra work in order to compose and retain documentation in order to appease federal law violated both federalism and the concept of a unitary executive.
This seems pretty similar.
So much for the conservative republican President's desire to keep govt. out of our lives. What a lying sack of shit he is!
Is one level of government going to sue another level of government?
Will they countersue yet another level of government for not providing enough funding to comply with the rules of the first level of government?
Ah, President Bush. I thought I smelled your foul stench. ... The more you tighten your grip, the more school systems slip right between your fingers...
What the rules DO now officially state (which they didn't before last year) is that electronic communications must now be treated the same as traditional paper documentation.
Specifically, that means that you cant destroy any correspondance or record HAVING TO DO WITH AN ONGOING LEGAL ACTION/LITIGATION or that you can reasonaby expect may lead to litigation. For my organization, that is less than one percent of the volume of data I have. All the vendors are saying that we need to archive ALL our e-mails in a searchable database yada yada yada so that we can protect ourselves against some unknown threat that we may be found in violation of these rules. That simply isn't the case. We will be in trouble if we destroy evidenmce in an ongoing legal case, but that is about it.
What we DO need to do is insure that the HR department and others that typically deal with sensitive legal topics understand the rules, and that they should print out and save anything that they suspect could come back to bite us, like adverse personell actions. We also need to insure that building administrators do the same when it comes to discipline actions concerning students etc.
AGAIN, anyone who tells you that you NEED to archive/store ALL e-mail or other electronic documents is at best completely mis-informed (like most of the journalists parroting back the FUD)or at worst trying to scam you directly with their FUD.
Keep passing the open windows...
Rob, are you keeping care record of all our electronic communications so that we/you can sued?
If the answer is war, you are asking the wrong question
So corporations are held to one standard. They get a mandate, and whether or not they have "funding", "technical ability", "legal expertise", they must comply.
However, when a government run monopoly gets the same mandate? A set of excuses are trotted out as to why they government monopoly cannot comply. The solution, without fail, involves taking more of my money.
Slashdot's insane liberal viewpoint always sympathizes with such "big government" operations, while spewing venom at the corporation.
All the vendors of e-mail archiving hardware/software want us to think we need to archive everything, but that's just not the case!
Keep passing the open windows...
Yeah, well, you can voluntarily decide not to sue anyone in federal court, but its a lot harder to make the decision not to be sued in federal court stick.
The PRESIDENT? What's the PRESIDENT go to do with it?
Quoting Wikipedia:
Internal rulemaking by the JUDICIAL branch - the supreme court and their hirelings - with concurrence from the LEGISLATIVE branch. The EXECUTIVE branch isn't even in this loop.
Are you faulting Bush for failing to stage an unconstitutional armed intervention into the inner workings of the Supreme Court?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Your estimates for the costs of private education are just as far off as your estimates of the money involved in public schooling. I suspect you have been misled by figures bandied about in the school voucher debate - these tend to lump secondary schools with elementary schools and even free schools to bring the apparent price down to less than the cost of a public school. For example, an often quoted figure for private school cost is $3600 per child - this is arrived at by taking the average for secondary school, elementary schools, free independent schools and church schools - all designed to make the secondary school cost look low. In truth, the average fee level of a private secondary school is rather higher at about $5,500. The gap between the private and public sector can be explained by a few things, such as reduction in bureaucratic red tape and potential increase in efficiency, but also by their frequent status as charitable organizations soliciting donations that can increase this to meet the public level, and their selectiveness; if you don't have to deal with unruly or disadvantaged children you can cut costs heavily.
My final point is that you seem to underestimate the costs in the day to day running of a school rather heavily! Just taking into account the staffing takes your available funds down to around $4k per pupil (and remember the schools that only make $3k per pupil originally?). Then you have to buy computers, books, stationary and furniture, run activities, organize school board elections, pay for heating, lighting and water and provide a bus for disabled students who can't get in otherwise. Depending on your location security might be an issue. And your building and equipment don't last forever with thousands of children inside - you need to make it to the end of the year with some surplus in case someone's broken a telescope or put a broom through the ceiling. (Or get insurance - but that will of course cost more than the average year's renovation costs; that's how insurance works).
My point with all this is that schools don't have millions of dollars sitting around in a cupboard somewhere. They aren't choosing not to employ a team of network technicians, it's just that even a small technical staff - say 2 people - eats into your budget by around $80k year if they're good at what they do. That money doesn't appear overnight.
Ah, President Bush. I thought I smelled your foul stench.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are promulgated by the Supreme Court (and written by their employees), after receiving a Congressional rubber stamp. Bush and his whole branch of government aren't even in the loop.
But somehow it's Bush's fault, right? Did you elect him the official scapegoat? (If you get a cold it's Bush's fault. If the Supreme Court promulgates a rule you don't like it's Bush's fault. He wasn't there for the election - but that's HIS fault.)
You really need to get medical attention for that jerking knee.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is TOTALLY inaccurate! the new rules, like the old rules, make NO distinction between education/private or size of business. they just say that you can't destroy evidence in an ongoing legal action!
Don't belive the hype!
Keep passing the open windows...
They ought to be able to say, "Beats me; we're in the education business, not the surveillance business. But good luck with your investigation."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yeah, its not like the Executive has any role in selecting who is in the judiciary or anything like that.
In addition, those posting about said conspiracies are required to mention The President's "apparent lack of I.Q.", but may in no way tie this to the paradox created by assuming that someone with such an "apparent lack of I.Q." is smart enough to be the root of all conspiracies. I hope that clears things up for you.
I would like to see a lot of reform in how schools introduce and teach technology. The biggest problem I see currently is the available budget schools get to spend. If the Federal Government is going to require this type of thing, are they going to be willing to create a grant for each and every school to get a computer lab to start off? What about IT staff? Many schools don't even have enough money to keep up with the costs of Xerox paper for their syllabus. Granted, a paperless classroom could be the argument, but you need to get to the point of implementation before you can talk about that.
Currently, I see reform needed providing more money to our schools. Keeping teacher's salaries out of the issue, money spent on technology classrooms, science labs, etc. would be great to see. Don't get me wrong, teachers need to be paid better or have better benefits, but if we continue to (as we do where I am from) increase teacher salaries without increasing the student's benefit from the school itself, we create a widening gap between educated generations. That gap will be working backwards instead of forwards (as it should). I can't wait for my children to explain things to me in very small sentences. At this pace though, I don't see that as happening.
Basically the problem is federal funding.
It works like this.
We work and pay taxes to both federal and state.
State runs school on state taxes and gets federal grants.
Too many people believe the power of government flows from the Fed to the state to the people.
FACT: power flows from the people to the state to the fed.
Problem:Fed withholds funds(our taxes)if states aren't politically correct and cause liberal embarassment.
Solution:contact your state representative with your concerns about school funding.Contact your u.s. representative about the fed digging its nose out of business it was never constitutionally allowed to be in.
Repeat as necessary.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
A lot of media sources and technology companies are taking this to the extreme because a) scary news sells more ad space and b) scary news sells more servers.d f [PDF file]
Here's a link to the original document: http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/Reports/ST09-2005.p
Focus on pages 24-36 of the pdf, which discusses the background of the new rules, and 103-240 which include the actual regulations. The new e-discovery rules do not require everyone to keep copies of everything forever.
Note that the full 332 page document includes multiple topics, only one of which is e-discovery.
And in closing, IANAL.
I don't know why all these people are complaining about the extra work forced on them by the government. Sure it took a few extra minutes to write an email purge script, but ever since then my work load has dropped dramatically. Every time I think that I have new work I just have to wait a few minutes and it goes away again. In fact my boss just came in to tell me that I don't need to come to work at all any more. Score!
You can say the sky is pink all day long, but I still see blue.
Blar.
But somehow -- I'm not sure how -- with no change to the law -- filtering (which is expensive and doesn't work very well) became an absolute requirement if you wanted E-rate money. Are you sure some silly thing like that isn't going to happen here?
As for the $##(*@& vendors. They must be breaking some law when they go out and make assertions that they know damn well are false. There's no real difference between this behavior and selling some little old lady junk bonds with the false assertion that they are fully insured and virtually risk free. My own feeling is that the vast majority of software salesmen will surely rot in hell, but perhaps letting them rot in county jails for a while would be a better and more immediate way to discourage their bad behavior.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
For that matter, why should public schools have to deal with unruly students at all? Under the current system, there seems to be a belief that everyone is entitled to a free education, no matter what. The right to a free education extends just as far as it doesn't interfere with others' rights to a free education. If a student is habitually disruptive or destructive, at some point we should step back and say, "You've forfeited your right to a free education. You can reapply next year. Get out." It would keep our schools focused on education instead of crisis management. Right now, the worst we can do is shuffle a disruptive "student" between schools. This doesn't even attempt to solve the problem. Right now, one or two "students" can completely destroy the learning atmosphere in a class of 30. How is this fair? On one hand, there are kids who actually do want to be there and really want to learn. On the other, there are those in the classrooms that don't want to learn; let them leave. If they're impeding other students, make them leave.
If your boss can simply pardon you for any criminal act that might otherwise implicate him in doing something unseemly... :-)
Observers note that widespread enforcement of the rules will likely begin by the end of 2007
And those poor districts who barely can provide any computing resources are likely to fold their IT shop as too expensive to maintain due to the legal threat of non-compliance. It's why many schools have a metal and wood shop, most have dropped Drivers Education as part of the regular HS electives.
I took Defensive Driving Drivers ED in High School. Now that I have adopted kids entering HS, we just received a notification that the Drivers Education program has been dropped. Anyone who signed-up will need to reschedule an elective class. Budget constraints were the reason for the change.
The computer classes are the next budget axe if compliance is too much of a liability for schools with limited budgets.
The truth shall set you free!
As several others have noted, the article is wrong. One can rant about the government or whoever, but the real problem is that the COMPUTERWORLD article is incorrect. The rules do not require you to do anything like the article says. I've been to several seminars with lawyers about this set of rules, and the reporter and those he quotes are flat-out wrong.
OK, so now everybody has to be able to lose email just as efficiently as the Whitehouse?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Clearly you did not get the /. memo: ... I hope that clears things up for you.
Why, yes, I did miss the memo.
So they DID elect him the official scapegoat:
- If invaders try to conquer Iraq, it's Bush's fault.
- If the Democrats raise taxes, it's Bush's fault.
- If the Supreme Court changes the rules of procedure, it's Bush's fault.
- If there's a hurricane in Timbuktu, it's Bush's fault.
Of course Bush wasn't there when they elected him scapegoat. But that's Bush's fault.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The FRCP are not generally-applicable laws. Rather, they are court rules and only apply to litigants, i.e., parties to actions in *federal* courts.
Sheesh.
IAWTC I am the only lawyer in my (small) firm that actually has any computer background (the next most competent lawyer didn't even know what firefox was when I asked to install it on my computer). As such, when the new e-discovery rules came down, I was put in charge of figuring out what to tell our clients. After reading through all of the new changes as well as a couple law review articles, my answer was that these rules didn't actually change anything. All that they did was explicitly state that a print out of your excel spreadsheet is not the same thing as the file containing the excel spreadsheet. Prior to the the enaction of these rules, any judge with the least common sense would have already known this and required you to turn over the electronic version of the file anyway. There is a little bit more about not having to search through backup files if they aren't easily accessible and its not clear that they have anything useful. It was always the rule that if you destroyed evidence when you anticipate litigation. It still is. Of course since most people don't have computer knowledge or legal knowledge, let alone both, everyone is running around like a chicken with their heads cut off and unnecessarily paying wheelbarrows full of money to back up their entire network. And of course lawyers who are either assholes or idiots are trying to subpoena the entire contents of opposing party's computer networks, along with their network schematics, for simple slip and fall cases. This of course doesn't mean any of these people are actually right.
In my book this is scary because so much of the worlds e-mail is sent into (and because of this stored for three years) by the US. Am I the only one seeing the problem here? Someone will have to go through all the "Hi mom. I don't feel so good, my girlfriend cheated on me"-emails to find the ones that actually have anything to do with the case? There will be humans doing the searches, humans who in general like having fun and will very likely abuse their rights to read e-mails and look for evidence.
This is one of those things that seems lika a good idea at the time, but the potential for abuse is limitless.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
Have a decent backup system.
You can usually define retention policies there. I'm pretty sure that while not quite as flexible or manageable as commercial systems, Bacula can define retention on a per job/filesystem basis. It can back up to tape, library and/or a BFO disk.
Deleted
For that matter, why should public schools have to deal with unruly students at all? Under the current system, there seems to be a belief that everyone is entitled to a free education, no matter what. The right to a free education extends just as far as it doesn't interfere with others' rights to a free education. If a student is habitually disruptive or destructive, at some point we should step back and say, "You've forfeited your right to a free education. You can reapply next year. Get out." It would keep our schools focused on education instead of crisis management. Right now, the worst we can do is shuffle a disruptive "student" between schools. This doesn't even attempt to solve the problem. Right now, one or two "students" can completely destroy the learning atmosphere in a class of 30. How is this fair? On one hand, there are kids who actually do want to be there and really want to learn. On the other, there are those in the classrooms that don't want to learn; let them leave. If they're impeding other students, make them leave.
This really is a difficult question to answer - I doubt we'll ever be sure what the solution is. Personally, I believe that everyone is entitled to a free education, no matter what. At the end of the day, these are children; they aren't mature enough to make reliably good decisions, and yet the decisions they make will have a huge effect on the rest of their lives. I'm a strong believer in personal responsibility, but I'm still not quite sure that the behaviour of unruly children is their fault - from my experience, the most problematic children are those who go home every night to parents who haven't had an education and don't think it's necessary. We make a big deal out of peer pressure and this is a thousand times more, the people to whom you look for a role model telling you that school is stupid and pointless and encouraging you to cause trouble. Society as a whole should, in my opinion, take it upon itself to protect those at risk, especially when they can't protect themselves; this protection should extend, I believe, to ensuring that where you're born doesn't stop you getting an education.What we need to find, in my opinion, is alternative solutions. At the end of the day some teachers find it much less of a problem to get problem children to work than others, and we need to work out what it is they're doing differently and make it much more widespread. More support outside the school can only help; studies repeatedly find that providing activities for children in the evening - sports, games etc - helps to improve concentration, attendance and behaviour during the day. Some students will still be unruly, and will still be disruptive, and some will have to be sidelined to keep the lessons going, but giving up on them isn't the answer.
Doubtless someone will reply with "but why should my hard-earned tax dollars pay for poor students to get extra help!?!" The answer to that is because there's nothing magic about you. It's not some sort of eternal karma that decides who is a bad student and who a good one, it's a combination of genes and environment. It could just as easily have been you.
The answer to that is because there's nothing magic about you.
I'm David Copperfield, you insensitive clod!
You're right there is a variance but it is down right deceitful of you to tag 'suburban NY' as if to say that inner cities are not spending money. Lets look at DC arguably the worst school system in the nation which spend more than any state (per pupil) except NJ (13K per kid) or NYC, can you get more urban, at nearly fourteen thousand (only 2% less than the state average). UTAH as a whole does not spend much money per pupil at 5K per pupil (least in the nation) so picking out Salt Lake City and your example even bolsters my point. West High in Salt Lake city (the school district you mentioned) is one of the top in the nation
"West High School has been named the top high school in Utah and number 158 in the nation by Newsweek and the Washington Post.
Its not the dollars going into the class its how they are getting used.
It is important to get past the "vendor hype." But, where there is smoke, there is often a fire. It is important to blow away the smoke and look at what is really going on. While I am not an attorney, I speak often about the Federal Rules and work very closely with K-12 schools.
First, there actually is no requirement in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that dictate that anyone has to archive anything. Rather, it says that if an electronic document exists "in the possession, custody, or control of the party" then it must be produced. This phrase is critical. Most people believe that this means that if an employee has a document on their laptop or home computer, then it is within the organizations custody and control, even if it is not physically on site. Therefore, without a centralized archive, organizations would need to do an costly and time-consuming exhaustive search of everyone's system. The conclusion made by most IT people is that a centralized archive is the easiest way to meet the retrieval requirement. It also adds the benefit of storing unedited documents.
There is an exception to the above statement about not keeping documents. The Rules are very specific about "litigation hold" and the need not to destroy potential evidence. (There is a very significant case on this matter, Testa v Wal-Mart Stores.) A central archive can limit liability if a faculty or staff member deletes an item that should have been on litigation hold.
While these rules apply to every organization in the company, schools are concerned because the risk of litigation is so high and they have many requirements. One of the more pervasive requirements that impact almost every school are state open meeting laws, such as the Brown Act in California. It is generally agreed that e-mails among a majority of School Board members are public documents because they constitute a public meeting and must be made available for disclosure to the public and the media.
This is where the FRCP, or its state equivalents, come into play: If a School Board member has an email subject to the open meeting laws on his/her computer, the School Board member is seen as being in "control" of the information in his/her official capacity. Therefore, the IT director would need to get the relevant document. Boy, wouldn't that be easier if the email was on a central source.
Other issues especially interested to school emails involve sex with minors, child pornography, and threats of violence. Many of these became visible to the authorities because of email disclosures. As a result many schools believe that archiving emails AND content monitoring are prudent steps for protecting children.
Several authors argue that some school districts are underfunded and under staffed for the extra work. I must agree. Anything that takes a dollar away from educating a student is a bad thing. However, even small schools should not be exempt from open meeting laws and other litigation. If it matters, small business is effected by this too. The recent case of 245-employee Taser International shows that small companies also must do whatever is necessary to abide by the law.
I have more about this topic on my blog, Death By Email
You're right there is a variance but it is down right deceitful of you to tag 'suburban NY' as if to say that inner cities are not spending money. Lets look at DC arguably the worst school system in the nation which spend more than any state (per pupil) except NJ (13K per kid) or NYC, can you get more urban, at nearly fourteen thousand (only 2% less than the state average). UTAH as a whole does not spend much money per pupil at 5K per pupil (least in the nation) so picking out Salt Lake City and your example even bolsters my point. West High in Salt Lake city (the school district you mentioned) is one of the top in the nation
"West High School has been named the top high school in Utah and number 158 in the nation by Newsweek and the Washington Post.
First, I'd like to point out that variance is not the same thing as variation. I wasn't talking about the variation in the amount spent in terms of school quality, I was discussing the variance of the data; the level of deviance from the mean. My point wasn't to characterize Utah's schools as being of low quality, just to show that your point - that they had money to spend on technology - was unfounded. If you want to discuss quality of schooling in terms of money spent, though, you might want to use an example other than West High to prove your point. The school is located by Capitol Hill, so has an affluent base to raise funds from. It receives $40 to $50 thousand dollars a year from alumni - an example of its affluent supporters. If you consult their financial report, you'll see they spend a further $1,040,000 from the student Activities Agency Fund, twice that spent by East, which has a comparable number of students (just under 90%). Their combined income from the Federal and State standard funding (Federal grants + State money, mostly raised from property taxes in its area) comes to just over $18m. By my calculations this gives them just under $8.5k per child per year, meaning that when I pointed to schools in Utah with a budget of $3k per child per year I probably wasn't talking about them. Just to clarify by the way, Salt Lake City school district spends an average of about $6k per child per year (again I refer you to their annual report). Bearing this in mind, I'm not quite sure why you chose a school in SLC as an example of a low spending Utah school - especially when you're so worried about people being deceitful!Its not the dollars going into the class its how they are getting used.
And to return to the original discussion - the lack of money for good technical staff in schools - I would like to refer you to the West High School website. As you can see, their income at 30% above the average has allowed them to employ a team of dedicated technicians and web designers.
I don't dispute your summation: "Its [sic] not the dollars going into the class its [sic] how they are getting used". What I object to is you labeling my post as deceitful and then following up with vague assertions ("arguably the worst school system"), bad data ("Salt Lake city [was] the school district you mentioned") and misleading examples ("West High School has been named the top high school in Utah"). Wages are higher in DC than in Utah - did you take this into account? Did you consider property prices? Did you, in fact consider a single statistic before claiming West High to be the proof that I was being "deceitful"?
I'm sure there are examples of poorly funded schools with exemplary results to be found somewhere. But I would ask you to do a little more research before calling names.
Did it ever occur to you the reason UTAH spends less it because the cost of living and average salery in UTAH are incredibally low? You can hire a good IT guy for considerably less in UTAH than in DC
According to Payscale.com a non-certified IT technician working for a school in Utah can expect about $33k a year. That's not a great deal less than my estimate, and to be perfectly honest the difference between $40k and $33k a year for a technician is largely academic for a school struggling for cash - there are simply better things to spend the money on.
Is there any reason you write "UTAH", by the way? As far as I'm aware it's not an acronym.
if you really want to see the Constitution restored. He is our LAST hope.
Do we have to keep a copy of all the encrypted messages that pass through our servers too? I guess everyone will have to turn a copy of their key over to the security administrator. Kinda kills the whole thing doesn't it?..
Completely stupid.
doesn't the government already have copies of all our e-mail anyway? Echelon. Believe it.
A simple IT solution for schools would be to turn off the computers. Tell students they will have to manually check out books, using the card catalogues that are hiding in a stockroom somewhere in every public school. Throw out the computers, the xerox machines, and go back to the days of the overhead projector, the #2 HB pencil, and the yummy smelling purple ink ditto machines. Student learning acquisition will improve, academic integrity will be higher (no more copy-pasted answers into a word document run with spell and grammar check to fix the incongruence of fragments. And, all the sudden there's extra money and more trees to help fix global warming because they'll be a lot less junk-printouts / photocopied worksheets (Hey, the books come with questions in them for a reason, was it only our generation who had to actually copy the question down in its entirety and THEN answer the ridiculous question with a complete sentence. "1). Bill has 2 apples and Jill has 3 apples, how many fruit do they have" "Bill and Jill have 5 apples together." Voila, IT Problem solved.
The federal government is not allowed to regulate education per the Constitution.
Libertas in infinitum
This article is a transparent attempt to get us to turn off our brains by picking a sympathetic poster child. What about the student or the teacher who gets mistreated/ discriminated against/ fired by a school and has to sue? Don't we want the school to preserve its emails so that the jury can hear what they say? This is no different for a school than it is for any business.
To be sure, doing the right thing can cost some money sometimes (though not nearly as much as the article supposes). But destroying evidence is doing the wrong thing.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)