Although rarely done, in the past few years, several Connecticut public school districts have been featured in the news for seeking criminal remedies against parents for theft of educational services. Parents who allegedly enrolled and sent their child to a school located in a town or city other than the one where the child actually resided […]
While the other aspects of Connecticut’s new gun control law have received more notoriety, the new law included a number of provisions intended to improve school safety and security including the following: Requires each school to have a safety committee; Requires each school to conduct a risk vulnerability assessment; Require each school to have a […]
In what is one of, if not the first decision of its type in Connecticut, an independent hearing officer has ruled that the Groton Board of Education had grounds to terminate Paul Kadri its Superintendent of Schools. As in most districts, Kadri was under contract which provided for grounds for termination similar to those […]
School is back in session for the 2012-2013 academic year and the time has arrived for school districts to fully implement all aspects of Connecticut’s anti-bullying law. July 1, 2012 marked the deadline for implementation of certain remaining aspects of the state’s bullying law last revised in 2011. With the advent of a new school […]
On Wednesday, June 27, 2012, the Connecticut State Board of Education (CSBOE) adopted long awaited definitions of excused and unexcused student absences as required under Public Act 11-136, An Act Concerning Minor Revisions to the Education Statutes. The new definitions promise to promote consistency and reliability in the state’s data collection and reporting related to student attendance. […]
School administrators frequently grapple with the treatment of video recordings. From Constitutional issues to concerns about education records, administrators need to be aware of how to use surveillance cameras appropriately and how to respond to requests for copies of those video recordings. As more and more districts are using video surveillance in schools, this issue promises to […]
The Anoka-Hennepin school district (District) in Minnesota recently entered into a five year consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of Civil Rights (OCR) to resolve two separate actions brought by six current or former district students alleging peer-on-peer harassment and discrimination based upon sex and […]
As you may recall from our previous posts regarding student’s online speech, the summer of 2011 brought with it a split in the Circuit Courts regarding how to handle discipline of student’s off-campus online speech. Specifically, the cases J.S. v. Blue Mountain Sch. Dist. and Layshock v. Hermitage Sch. Dist. out of the Third Circuit and Kowalski v. Berkeley County Schools out of the […]
This month, the FCC released long awaited Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) rule revisions. CIPA is a federal law enacted by Congress to address concerns about access to offensive, obscene or harmful content by minors over the Internet on school and library computers. In early 2001, the FCC issued rules implementing CIPA. FCC recently released […]
On August 2 we posted an article about a new law set to go into effect in Missouri prohibiting on-line communications between teachers and students that seemed to have some potentially problematic language in it. Late last week a Missouri judge issued an injunction preventing the new law from going into effect. Apparently, the law […]
