What year and what country (or development level)? I cannot believe this would be legal today in any highly developed country. Did you complain to school administrators? It would have made a great local newspaper article about mistreatment of (sometimes temporarily) physically disabled students.
It sounds like your school was run in an authoritarian and deeply unpleasant way. That's sad and infuriating, but I don't think that has any particular relevance to banning an object which didn't exist at the time.
What I have heard from similar cases previously is that in a school you basically have no rights. Previous cases the school has been determined to be within their legal rights when doing things like this(including involving the police). I don't know much more than that though.
Sadly PA isn’t listed so I’ll never know if I had more or less rights in my old alternative school I blasted on Boing Boing than the literal prison that they kept threatening to throw me into.
It is indeed sad. There are folks in this system who perpetuate abuse for profit and/or sadism who should not be tolerated in a civilized society.
There is something very wrong with the school (system) if you actually got expelled for that. If that is the whole story, they should have explained why it was wrong and tried to encourage you to learn more, responsibly, by actually asking you to help them with securing their system. That is roughly what my headmaster in Russia did in similar circumstances. The thought of expelling a kid over something silly like this wouldn't even cross anyone's mind.
Especially in wealthier areas, school administrations have to bend over backwards to please parents or they really will sue the school districts over insane things like this.
Kids got in serious trouble for this back then too. I'm not sure I could find a article, but I do remember hearing about it happening in the news (post columbine). I'm pretty sure the kids who committed columbine also did this with a Doom level editor. So rightly or not, school officials would see this as copy-cat behavior.
This post is 100% spot on. While the local school district may treat it as a prank, in the U.S. the federal authorities may not. To see how seriously the government takes this act, look at the penalties section of the relevant U.S. code.
I cannot imagine this taking place in this day and age. The principal would have you marched out of the school escorted by police and charged you with a federal crime or something.
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