It's enough to make you long for the days of spitballs in the classroom. When todays K-12 students act up, they increasingly are going high-tech by using the school's network to launch denial-of-ser-vice attacks, sending harassing e-mails or breaking into databases to try to change their records. With public schools now widely equipped with LANs and highspeed Internet access, IT administrators have to cope with students who run amok in many ways. Some infractions, such as attempts to get to pornography sites, might force administrators to temporarily yank a child's network access as punishment. But some types of incidents, such as hacking and e-mail threats, even end up with students being booted out of school or in trouble with the law. "The main problems start developing around 7th or 8th grade," says Lee Sleeper, technology manager at Bullard Independent School District in Texas, which has 1,650 students who get a password and account to access a multi-Gigabit fiber network and the Internet. Each 8th- to 12th-grader also gets an e-mail account.
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