School's failure to change clocks lands student 12-day stint in juvie

So even though the world didn't come to an end due to the earlier daylight-savings time changeover this year, one 15-year resident of Hempfield, PA certainly got burned by the supposed energy-conserving maneuver, as his school's inability or failure to change all of their clocks earned him 12 days in juvenile detention on charges of making a bomb threat. The story goes like this: For some reason sophomore Cody Webb decided to call the Hempfield Area High School delay hotline in the early morning hours of March 11 -- very close to the time we "sprang ahead" -- and claims to have hung up immediately after listening to the obvious "no delay" message. Well unfortunately for him, someone else called Hempfield that morning with a bomb threat, and because the phone system erroneously time-stamped that call as coming just minutes after Cody's, school and local law enforcement geniuses decided that they must have been made by the same person (despite one call showing up on caller ID while the other was blocked). Long story short, it took Cody's parents and their lawyer 12 days to get the honors student out of juvie; and while you would expect a public apology from everyone involved in this blunder after the facts came out, school officials are trying to pass the blame along to the state, which seems more concerned with covering its proverbial legal ass than making things right for the now-home-schooled Cody. Lessons learned? 1. Our schools need to devote more resources to teaching the nuances of telling time, and 2. Teenagers are clearly better off partying and causing mischief on a Saturday night than sitting at home on the phone.

[Via Slashdot, photo courtesy of S.C. Spangler/Tribune-Review]