Technology will bite you in the ass. And now, even though it bit this lady big time, I agress with her sentiment. A phone call to a public school administrator's home last week about a snow day —- or lack of one —- has taken on a life of its own. Through the ubiquity of Facebook and YouTube, the call has become a rallying cry for students' First Amendment rights, and it shows the generation gap in technology. The phone call has gone viral all over the internet and now the kid who posted it is a little regretful about that. It seems the media has gone viral with their "need to know."
Dean Tistadt, the Chief Operating Officer for Facilities and Transportation of Fairfax County, has found it his responsibility to make the decisions about whether or not schools should remain open. Recently, due to the abnormal winter weather, the Tistadt household has found itself bombarded with dozens of phone calls from county students; some even in the middle of the night. In addition, students are also sending profane and sometimes even threatening emails to the administration. Fairfax County schools spokesman Paul Regnier said: "It's really an issue of kids learning what is acceptable and not acceptable. Any call to a public servant's house is harassment." Candy Tistadt did not return phone messages. Dean Tistadt credited Kori for having the "courage of his convictions to stand up and be identified" - and for causing considerable embarrassment for his wife.
Okay, so the lady went a little over the top. But the point that she was trying to make, maybe not in the most politically correct way, was great! It's about time that someone told these kids to grow up and get their buts back in school...learning their A-B-C's not texting RU@skool. We are raising a generation of mindless kids who can't talk a single sentence and that's a sad friggin' fact. And there's one more fact that's true to this story...it's the fact that they both had learned a hard lesson about the long reach of the Internet.
