Students cancel classes

This is pretty funny..

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4475835.html

Houston-area students anxious for a day off from school dredged up a decade-old Chron.com Web page and circulated it among tens of thousands of people Monday, fooling many into thinking schools were shut down Tuesday.

Although the Web page clearly stated it contained "school closings for Jan. 14, 1997," the list of more than 50 Houston-area public school districts — including Houston, Spring and Galena Park — prompted plenty of confusion among administrators, school employees, parents and students.

The online story, which referred to one of the area's worst ice storms in recent years, was viewed at least 74,000 times on Monday and 4,000 on Tuesday, according to Chron.com editors.

"The Chron.com story listing school closings from 1997 was not posted on the Chron.com Web site this week or sent out by the Chronicle, but was in the site's archives," said Scott Clark, vice president/editor of Chron.com. "You can sometimes reach links to older stories through a Web search. Apparently someone found the link and distributed it widely."


Waiting to decide
During severe weather, Chron.com typically posts a link to current school closings on its home page. Most area school districts said Tuesday that they would decide this morning whether to cancel classes.

Numerous school districts called the Houston Chronicle on Monday evening to report that Chron.com incorrectly stated their district had canceled Tuesday classes.

Although not all districts have tallied their Tuesday absences, at Galena Park — where district officials say students circulated e-mails with links to the 1997 story — nearly a quarter of students missed school. The normal attendance rate is 97 percent, said district spokesman Craig Eichhorn.

"We don't know why at this point," Eichhorn said. "There was no ice, so we're looking at different reasons. It could have been the e-mail or the outstanding weather threat."

News broadcasts with warnings about "bitter winter blasts" and "arctic cold" could have also led parents to keep their children home, he said.

Spring ISD students also got hold of the old Web page.

"Kids have gone on to MySpace.com and that's how it spread around," said Spring Assistant Superintendent Regina Curry.


Victim of a prankster

Thanks to an unrelated hoax, classes in Humble ISD schools were less than half full. Scores of students skipped class after media incorrectly reported school closings for the district Monday night, district spokeswoman Karen Collier said.

"An individual pretending to be my assistant called a number of media outlets to find out how to send information via e-mail," she said. "They then sent a statement that there would not be school for the next two days using an e-mail address very similar to mine but missing some punctuation."

Atascocita High School sophomore Adrian Yepez was not surprised that the initial news was inaccurate.

"Why would they have called school off for two days? They don't know what the weather is going to do," Yepez said, adding that the school buses were nearly empty Tuesday morning.

Kingwood High School junior Sarah Coffin stayed up late Monday night and watched a movie with her father, planning to sleep in Tuesday.

"We learned on the news early Tuesday that we actually did have school. A lot of people were really mad; they had stayed up late and not done their homework," Coffin said. "Some people thought it was funny but most were annoyed because they were tired and not ready."

Campus attendance Tuesday decreased 30 to 50 percent, Collier said. That could be costly for the school district, because attendance figures are used to calculate how much money schools get from the state.

"The funding impact is anywhere between $600,000 and $1 million, not to mention the chaos caused in the lives of thousands of students and parents," Collier said. "We intend to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. If it turns out this was done by a minor, the parents may be held financially responsible."


Sent directly to the media

Collier said the faux message was sent directly to media outlets as well as through Read Communications, which operates School-alerts.com. About 1,000 Houston-area schools, including Humble, use the service.

Company president David Read said they're never had any problems with people hacking into the system, and he referred comments about the Humble situation to district officials.

School-alerts.com allows designated school officials to log in and send a message to all media outlets and registered parents about school delays, closings or activity cancellations, Read said.

Although the Web site sees little traffic most of the time, it has seen upticks with past tropical storms and hurricanes and experienced a huge spike during the past two days with the potential ice-over. The Web site was averaging 100,000 page views per hour.

Most school districts said they update their own Web sites immediately, as well as any hot lines. Most also contact the media immediately, and several said they used automated phone messaging systems to call parents. Some districts use Internet-based communications programs to notify media, parents and employees about potential closings or delays.