Chapter 14: Unstripping, High School Version

Tamara was well into the second week of high school now and was enjoying her classes—mostly. She really liked participating in the discussions, but found that her doing so was getting her recognized as a nerd. But her love for learning soon overcame her reluctance to “put herself out there,” so she embraced the “nerd” within herself and didn’t let any name-calling bother her. She wanted to put some of her free time to good use, so she contacted Mrs Moore, her counselor, to tell her that she wanted to help tutor kids in math and science.

“Do you have any preference—like girls only or freshmen only?” Moore asked. “I know you’ve mastered the whole math curriculum and physics too. What about chemistry, biology, and the other sciences?”

“I don’t really teach when I tutor, Mrs Moore. I found the best way to help kids understand the material is to guide them so that they can discover how to learn the material on their own. I show them how to read critically and how to study as we work through their questions. And I have no grade or gender preferences. The kids I want to work with really have to want to learn, though.”

“We get a lot of requests from the team coaches,” Moore told her. “The athletes need to maintain their grades to stay eligible. Can I refer the athletes to you?”

“Sure. Just so they know that I won’t do their work for them.”

Moore added Tamara to the school’s list of tutors. Tamara also had accepted the principal’s offer for her to be a student aide—her plan about how she could help the SiF kids in her school had taken shape nicely. When she first began thinking about disabling the high school students’ RFID tags, she had realized that waiting at the door and using her device there, like she had done at her middle school, wouldn’t work very well here. That was because students could enter the building through more than one door—not to mention that this school had many more students.

The problem of her being able to find out the SiF students’ names appeared to be solved when she learned that one of her jobs was to scan the daily student attendance reports into an office computer. If she simply put a flash drive into a USB port of the computer, she could save a copy for herself. But that wasn’t ethical—possibly not legal either. But her chip zapper wasn’t exactly legal either. Using it very definitely broke the SiF law. Would copying a file be more or less illegal? She needed some advice.

“Mom,” Tamara asked after school that day, “I have a legal question where a number of ethical issues interfere with the law. You know how Dad says that laws address the least common denominator of society—like one size fits all? It’s not possible for a law to consider all cases and situations, so it’s written so broadly that sometimes innocent people can get trapped into violating it?”

“That’s true, but a society without laws is basically an anarchy. What’s troubling you, dear?”

“It’s how to help kids at my school who are in SiF and don’t wanna be in it. I told you what I did at Thomas Mann. I can’t do that here ... too many kids, and they have different schedules and there are a lot of doors to cover. A school district tech gave me a broken scanner and its circuits gave me access to the entire state SiF list. They didn’t even bother to encrypt it; shows you how much value the state puts on information security.”

“So what’s your ethical dilemma?” Nadine asked.

“I can use the state list to match names with kids in my school. Then I can contact them, anonymously, and offer to inactivate their chips. But I would need to get a copy of the daily attendance report. I scan them most every day so getting a copy would be simple and no one would know. It’s the ethics that bother me. Is helping the kids higher on the ethical scale than, I assume, doing something which violates a trust issue? No one told me that I can’t copy that info but I’m sure I’m not supposed to.”

Nadine stopped to think. “I should tell you not to do this, you know. But a big concern I have, in all my years of counseling my congregation, is of the power one group has over another. Holding power over someone is a form of coercion, and if exercising that power causes harm, then it’s wrong. However, to react against that power, if that action causes harm, then that’s wrong too.

“Your ethical dilemma seems to fall into a power imbalance situation, so we need to look at its parts...”

“That’s it, exactly,” Tamara interrupted excitedly. “The state with the SiF law is causing harm to the kids, forcing them to do something that they hate or think is morally wrong.”

“Okay then, the state, that’s the stronger power, and it’s causing harm to individuals. We need to look at the remedy you propose to be sure that the remedy doesn’t cause harm to anyone else. Let’s list all of the actors in your dilemma.”

Tamara looked confused. “‘Actors’? Like in a movie?”

“Oh, no, dear. Sorry. ‘Actor’ in the sense of someone taking an action. Like the kids needing to be naked.”

“Oh, got it. Yeah, the kids. Then, the SiF law ... so that would be the state—Florida. Individuals? Like the SiF officials?”

“That works. Who else?”

“Um, the school, since I’d be copying a school file. So the principal? Secretary?”

“Maybe the school district officials too and even the school board members,” Nadine amended. “Can you think of anyone else you’d affect?”

“Um, no? Who else is there?”

“How about the parents of the kids?”

“Oh! Right, we need to think of them, of course. See, I knew you were very smart, Mom.”

“No brown-nosing the judge, honey. So you’ve identified the actors. Now, where does any power imbalance occur?”

“Should I list them in decreasing power? Each, um, actor has some power, I guess.”

“Doing it like that would be fine.”

“Okay, at the top are the Florida officials. They made the law and enforce it. Oh, there are police and courts too—are they actors?”

“Well, you can think of them as part of the Florida group.”

“Good. Hey, there are really two, um, strands, here, Mom. The SiF strand and the um, remedy strand, right? They should be separate, right?”

“I’m glad you saw that; very good, dear. Go on.”

“Okay, so Florida officials and then parents and then kids. The officials force the parents to harm the kids, sort of. Anyway, it’s the kids who are harmed. Florida has the power over the parents who have power over the kids. The kids have a tiny amount; resisting if they can, I guess.”

Nadine nodded. “That’s one strand or chain.”

Tamara went on. “Then my remedy would be in the other chain. Florida at the top, since I’d be breaking that law. Next, the district officials and finally the school officials, because I’d be using school files. Oh, the kids and parents would be in my chain too, I guess. Duh. My remedy affects them mostly.”

“So you have the actors now, and their relative power over each member—the links in the chains. Now consider the harm caused to people in both chains.”

Tamara frowned. “I mentioned the SiF harm to the kids. My remedy is to fix that and break some laws and rules when I do. In the SiF chain, my remedy causes no personal harm to Florida officials since they or their jobs would not be personally harmed if kids began wearing clothes. Of course, if the SiF program is stopped, some jobs might end, but that’s what? A theoretical harm?”

“You could view it that way.”

“Good, then comes my remedy chain. I think I need to go up the chain with this one. Using the student list from the school benefits the kids and possibly the parents; the parents don’t have to worry about their kid exposing them to a fine for breaking the SiF clothing law. We already know that the state can’t do anything to harm the kids or parents when a failed tag is involved—you found that out from what happened at Thomas Mann. My having the student list doesn’t harm the school officials personally since they wouldn’t know it was copied and used. The same with the district officials; no one there would be personally harmed.”

Nadine smiled. “That’s a good analysis. Now, what’s the score? Benefit versus harm?”

“Can I do the chains again?”

Nadine nodded.

“Okay, The Florida SiF chain harms kids themselves, and the parents too, a little, I suppose. There’s no personal benefit from the SiF law to anyone. The remedy chain benefits kids personally and harms no one, the same way. Oh, and I suppose I need to think of any property damage too.”

“Good point. That’s a part of the harm equation,” Nadine said.

“Sure. Okay, the RFID tags will be fried. But the parents bought them and paid to have them inserted. The value of a chip is tiny—about a dollar, Sue told me. The SiF fee is really a registration fee, not a chip purchase. So I guess the property damage is about zero.”

“I suppose that’s a valid argument, but there could be other points of view,” Nadine observed. “So how does thinking about harm versus benefit make you view your dilemma?”

“Um ... Is it okay to violate the law in a good cause?” Tamara asked. “I think that if a law is bad ... like it discriminates, or maybe even interferes with other laws, it can be ignored. Right?”

“There are a lot of instances of that happening, honey. Look at the recent past. Civil rights protestors would violate laws; there’s a term for this, it’s ‘civil disobedience.’ Basically, civil disobedience is illegal non-violent political action which is done for moral reasons. Some people even consider that in certain situations, doing property damage is sometimes morally permissible.”

“Oh! Sure, I remember about that in my civics class. So if no one is personally harmed by my using school records, and the purpose is to fix the personal harm to others, then it’s morally okay to break some rules.”

“And in your case, being extremely careful in the process,” Nadine nodded.

“Oh thank you, Momma! This was a great help,” Tamara exclaimed as she hugged her mother.

Tamara decided that she would copy the attendance file the next time she was given that job.

It wasn’t long before Tamara got her first tutoring referral. It was a junior girl who was falling behind in her math class.

“I just don’t get this geometry crap,” Olivia complained after Tamara greeted her.

“You did take Algebra I, right?”

“Yeah, and I did okay, a ‘B’ in the class.”

“Well, that’s got concepts that can be harder for lots of people,” Tamara told her. “Where is geometry hardest for you—I know it’s only been two weeks.”

“It’s all the names of things, I guess. I mix them up. I confuse area and perimeter. Circles? Circumference, radius...”

“Yeah, I know. Diameter, chord, tangent, interior angle ... Right?”

“Yes. And the proofs of theorems.”

Tamara nodded. “Sure. You named the keys to learning geometry. I’ll show you how it works and we’ll have fun along the way too. Learning terms is just memorizing, like learning spelling. A tangent? That’s a man who spends all summer at the beach.”

Olivia giggled. “Not funny!”

“No? Then you won’t like what a rectangle is: a smashed angle.”

“Oh my god, Tamara.”

“What’s another name for an adorable angle? Acute angle.”

Olivia was laughing now. “No, stop it. Do you always do that?” she asked, laughing.

Tamara tried to make a serious face. “Who, me? Yes, I do. I enjoy helping people learn things and if they laugh, it helps them learn. It’s fun, right? Let’s learn some terms now and try to make them into puns. Then you’ll never forget them, guaranteed.”

At the end of the session, Olivia was so happy that she hugged Tamara.

“Oh, you were awesome, Tamara!” she gushed. “I think I can see how to do some of the theorems now, too.”

“Good,” Tamara said. “Just remember; think of the postulates and basic theorems you’re learning now as playing cards. Then you play them when you have more complicated problems to work out. See you next time?”

“For sure.”

Word of Tamara’s tutoring abilities rapidly spread and she soon became one of the more popular tutors at Edison.

Mid-September

In mid-month, Tamara brought home a letter to Nadine and Wilson telling them of a parents’ meeting the following week. The meeting was to discuss the school district’s plans to begin the Naked in School Program in Miami. Miami Edison High was not on the list of schools to begin the Program because their graduation rate was below the school district’s cutoff. But the principal wanted parents to know what was happening in the state and the rest of the school district.

The next day, Wilson came home with a newspaper.

“Hey, honey,” he called to Nadine and greeted her with a kiss. “Ray gave me this newspaper.”

He opened it.

“Tallahassee Beacon?” Nadine asked. “Why did he have a Tallahassee paper?”

“He has a sister living there. She’s a high-school counselor in the city and Ray says she sees kids in the SiF program who are depressed. You know Ray has two teen boys; well, they were caught skinny-dipping and Ray is facing having them put into the SiF program or he faces a huge fine. His sister mentioned that she knows some parents in her own school district who were faced with a similar penalty, so she told him to get the paper because an article in it mentions how some parents got the fines thrown out. She also told him that in another case, the parents moved to Georgia—it’s only about fifteen miles from her school—and they’re commuting. Those kids are in a Georgia school now. Anyway, she told Ray to get this paper because there’s an exposé of the whole SiF program in it. He gave it to me after he read it because he remembers about Tamara’s run-in with the SiF people.”

“What’s in the exposé?” Nadine asked as Tamara came into the room and Wilson greeted her.

“Hi, sweetie. I was telling your mom about this exposé of the SiF program that this newspaper published yesterday.

“The report began with a story about how a lot of stripped kids in the Tallahassee area were getting around the law and escaping detection; the schools had began noticing that there were fewer and fewer naked kids in school as the year passed, so reporters canvassed a number of Tallahassee schools and found kids who were wearing some kind of arm band. They were clothed chipped kids and the bands kept their chip from being detected. Instructions for making the arm band are all over the social media, they reported. So they decided to look into the program.

“The SiF program was supposed to earn the state money by charging a fee to strip kids, both residents and also tourists. The report in here covered tourists first. The people who proposed this program thought that by giving visitors to the state the option to strip their kids when they came to Florida, it would increase tourism and thus revenue. The article showed that for the first year or two, there was a bump in tourism but now the numbers are trending lower than before the SiF program got started.”

“That’s interesting ... maybe at the beginning it was a novelty and that’s worn off,” Nadine commented.

Wilson continued. “Apparently. For state residents, then, the paper’s reporters dug out some interesting facts. First, the registration costs—the state had to keep raising the price of registering a kid because the costs weren’t keeping up with the revenue. Now the registration cost is high—$150, and it costs the parent at least $186 for the doctor’s visit to get the SiF chip implanted. So at first only about 80 percent of the parents who buy the SiF registration, now it’s down to 60 percent, actually go through with having it implanted, especially when they see—and the kids see—the big honkin’ needle that’s used. Almost every doc will refuse to implant a chip if the kid isn’t cooperative.”

“I wondered about that,” Nadine said. “What kid would want a big needle stuck into their arm?”

“Sure. And see here? This part is what Ray was interested in. The legal challenges to the very severe penalties for parents if their kids violated the SiF law. The article tells about a class-action suit in Jacksonville. The kids in eleven families violated something in the law and their parents were each fined $5000 and the children were given 500 hours of community service. Those penalties were ridiculous, the parents argued. Also, what kind of community service can a 10- or 11-year-old kid do? And that number of hours could mean two or even more years of service. The judge agreed and invalidated the penalties of the SiF law, as a violation of the maximum penalties permitted under another Florida law and it also violates the U.S. constitutional prohibition against ‘cruel or unusual punishments.’ The article reports that there were similar legal challenges in other courts.”

“What’s that mean for the SiF program, then?” Nadine asked.

“Wait, there’s more, honey. Look at this next section of the article. It’s about the costs. The chips are the least of the costs. The reporters did an analysis of the infrastructure costs. The law mandated that each retail store in the state purchase and install the scanners for their shops. The merchants fought back against that unfunded mandate and the state lost. The paper reports that there are 273,723 retail shops in the state and the minimum cost of a scanner with installation is about $1100. Just placing the scanners in retail stores alone comes to an expense of $301.1 million at the lowest end, assuming just a single entrance door for each shop. Then add to that the schools, office buildings, public buildings, and everywhere else the state put the scanners and they came up with a scanner cost of not less than $549 million. Then the state ordered 3 million tags at $1.13 each. Add the cost of computers, office space, handheld scanners and all the rest ... see, the total they report for infrastructure cost is $786 million, minimum. And the annual operating costs for the program, they calculated, is $7.2 million.”