Kentucky high school chemistry experiment goes terribly wrong: plus “Bonus Lesson”

Risks when your local school shares data it collects on your child with others

They had a “hot” time in a Glasgow High School chemistry class last Friday with an experiment that turned out to be “all wet.”

The Glasgow Daily Times reports (subscription for full article) that a silly experiment to ignite clouds of natural gas in a classroom (lighting fires in a classroom – what a great idea – NOT!) did the inevitable – triggering the sprinkler located right overhead.

That wound up soaking all sorts of technology devices and eventually flooded numerous classrooms.

This silly stunt got caught on video.

And then came a demonstration that anything caught in a computer – such as sensitive data schools collect on students – can live forever. You see, the original video was removed from You Tube, probably at the request/demand of the school. However, copies of the video keep cropping up in You Tube like mushrooms, anyway.

This crazy science stunt scorched the new school’s ceiling (nice show of respect for taxpayer provided facilities) and probably shortened the life of a nearby electric light fixture, just to name a few other unintended consequences.

Of course, someone had to cough up for water damage treatment from this silly stunt.

The video of this nutty affair got posted on You Tube under the title “Teaching Fail!! Chemistry Teacher Experiment Goes Wrong.” The Times says the video got 313,000 views between last Friday and Monday.

But, here’s the rest of the story.

Apparently, someone didn’t like that video. Today, I could not find a You Tube under that title with anywhere near so many viewings. I did find a You Tube announcement that said a video with this title had been removed by the user.

However, this video is far from dead. Numerous other videos with the same title are now on You Tube. They all seem to contain the same material (check here, here, here, and here (for just a few examples).

Apparently, other people made copies of the original video as soon as it hit the Internet and posted those copies to You Tube.

The original video is gone, but it lives on anyway, perhaps forever.

That brings us to an important lesson about anything that winds up in computers. The lesson: once things get into a computer, they can spread like fungus. The original owner of the material can lose all control.

Keeping this You Tube sample lesson in mind, parents should think very carefully about plans afoot to share all the sensitive data your local school collects on your child in its computer system with all sorts of other groups. Groups angling for or already having access to that information include the Kentucky Department of Education, other Kentucky agencies, federal agencies and even private vendors of school services and materials.

Furthermore, the ever increasing data collected about your child – and you – in these school databases get backed up somewhere in the Internet “Cloud” on still other computers, often owned by private companies. Sure, the data won’t be posted on You Tube (at least not until someone unauthorized gets access), but multiple copies of your child’s sensitive information are flowing around all over the place. Sensitive data about your child is going to live on – forever – somewhere.

With all sorts of sensitive stuff like credit card information and social security numbers and even military secrets getting hacked in the Internet, exactly what kind of assurances cans anyone give you that what happened to this You Tube won’t happen to your child’s data, as well.

Think about it.

Think about it a lot harder than some science teacher did before he lit off uncontained flammable gas clouds directly underneath a sprinkler head in a public school. And, stay tuned. I’ll have more to say about the enormous database some school people want to set up for your child.