Could this ever happen in SD?

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Could this ever happen in South Dakota? From Yahoo.com
School District to Monitor Student Blogs
Tue May 23, 9:42 AM ET

High school students are going to be held accountable for what they post on blogs and on social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com.

The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

The rule will take effect at the start of the next school year, officials said.

District officials won't regularly search students' sites, but will monitor them if they get a worrisome tip from another student, a parent or a community member.

Mary Greenberg of Lake Bluff, who has a son at Libertyville High School, argued the district is overstepping its bounds.

"I don't think they need to police what students are doing online," she said. "That's my job."

I think that mom sums it all up in a nutshell. Speaking as a parent she says "That's my job."

And really, that ties into an argument we have in South Dakota over what constitutes sex ed. Schools want to teach students what they think is appropriate. Parents say that they want to determine what is appropriate.

I could go on, (as I started to go off on a tangent about using Harry Potter books in reading class*) but the point I want to make is that the more we expect schools to act as a parent, the more authority they are going to take. And at some point, as above, they're going to infringe on the rights of parents to be parents and make determinations for their children.

Could it happen here? I hope not. But if it does, we only have ourselves to blame.

*Just by way of explanation, a harry potter flap is what got my wife thinking about running for the School Board several years back when she successfully ran and won. In Pierre we had a bunch of zealots calling harry potter devil worship and they freaked when an english class wanted to take kids to the first movie, which coincided with the book they were reading. The school district canceled, caving in to pressure, and one of my kids missed out. The zealots at least got one level headed person to run for school board.

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