WiFi: Another Legal Accident Waiting to Happen

Tomorrow, June 6, in a Toronto Divisional Court, lawyers for Peterborough Needs PCVS will make their arguments regarding KPR’s mishandling of the attempted PCVS closure. In the upcoming posts, we’ll put the Judicial Review into a broader perspective and look closely at some of the details.

While the lawyers prepare their cases, let’s wrap up our examination of another issue on which KPR may one day face legal action from the very people it supposedly serves – the ill-conceived plunge into the world of pervasive WiFi.

In the preceding two posts we’ve seen the way KPR’s repression of dissent around its WiFi plan resembles that around the attempt to close PCVS. We’ve also seen the direct link between astronomical technology expenses and the drive to close schools, and the obliviousness of KPR trustees and administrators of the Pandora’s Box they’re opening in allowing students unlimited internet access on their own hand-held devices.

The most important issue around WiFi for many, however, continues to be the safety hazard it poses.

Unless you’re a trained scientist, it’s not likely that you understand the nature of different kinds of radiation, or what role exposure to them can play in long-term health problems. Even among scientists themselves, there’s no unanimity, as demonstrated by the differences of opinion on the subject held by doctors and Trent University professors. Last year, KPR made the news by handpicking professors who supported their view of WiFi for a public information session, while excluding Environmental and Resource Studies professor Magda Havas, whose research concerns public health effects of industrial development, as you can see from her extensive website, which includes useful information on “electro-pollution.”

The fact is that Kawartha Safe Technology supporters are far from the only ones to suspect long-term negative effects will result from extensive, uncontrolled exposure of children to WiFi radiation. KSTI’s position – that school boards, as public bodies, should err on the side of caution – is a common-sense one, especially because schools are already hardwired and WiFi has little more to offer than convenience. As with other “conveniences” in our contemporary world, such as junk food, plastic bottles, and disposable consumer items, WiFi’s eventual cost will likely outweigh its benefits many times over.

This past February, Peterborough’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Rosana Pellizzari, wrote to KPR’s Director of Education in response to concerns about WiFi in schools raised at the Peterborough City-County Health Unit by parents and teachers. Pellizzari asked for clarification as to why KPR had done nothing to accommodate concerned parents, and for a comment on the radiation measurements made in KPR schools as reported by the KSTI.

Embarrassingly, the dynamic duo of Rusty Hick and Diane Lloyd took Pellizzari’s query as an invitation to promote KPR’s “vision” of “why the use of wireless technology is a crucial component of 21st century learning.” Predictably, their response, which you can read here, failed to answer the question as to why KPR hasn’t bothered to accommodate concerned parents by offering some kind of WiFi-free environment – unless you count the elimination of the problem of having “cables strewn across the floor” as a justifiable rationale.

Hick and Lloyd state unequivocally that they “know the technology is safe.” They also state that one of the main reasons for installing WiFi is to allow students to use their own hand-held devices in class. The defense they offer regarding the safety of WiFi is threefold: a) a lot other institutions are using it; b) the measurements made in classrooms are lower than the Health Canada threshold for radiation exposure; and c) many health authorities have concluded that “wireless technology does not pose a public health risk.” KPR’s attitude toward WiFi is perhaps best summed up in the blunt characterization of it as “a fact of modern life.”

A more sophisticated view is offered by the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association. This past March they issued a position paper (included in the correspondence at the above link) which quite rationally compares this potential workplace hazard to cigarettes and asbestos, and observes that “the health effects of unprecedented long-term exposure to this radiation may not be known for some time.” The paper points out that school boards like KPR are engaging in an uncontrolled experiment with its students by exposing them to WiFi signals for unprecedented durations throughout their growth from young children to adults.

The paper notes that Health Canada’s “safety code 6” threshold of 1000 microwatts per square centimeter – a threshold repeatedly referred to by KPR and others as their primary benchmark – is based on a six-minute exposure by an adult male, and was never intended to be applied to schools. The paper also observes that many countries in Europe have much more stringent guidelines than Health Canada’s, and unlike Health Canada, also consider deeper potential long-term biological effects.

The OECTA paper also points out that “at least three percent of the population has an environmental sensitivity to the radiation emitted” by wireless devices – often to levels far below the Health Canada guideline. The paper notes that “employers have a duty to accommodate persons with environmental sensitivities under the Canadian Human Rights Code as well as the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.” KPR and other school boards, backed by the Ministry of Education, have chosen to ignore these facts, at their own legal peril.

Remember when it was perfectly fine to wear strong perfumes in schools? Who could have conceived a generation ago that people with chemical sensitivities would complain, and have their rights to a healthy environment upheld? Who would have wagered that schools would become “nut-free” in deference to those with allergies? My grade 12 math teacher routinely went to the staff room to smoke a pipe, and held the view that both he and his students should be allowed to smoke in class. Now we don’t even tolerate smoking in the school yard.

And then there’s asbestos. KPR is now on the hook for a million-dollar asbestos removal-and-containment bill as they refurbish TASSS. Apparently this deadly carcinogen, responsible for the early deaths of many thousands of unsuspecting people, was thought perfectly acceptable to install in schools when TASSS was built forty years ago.

The first legal action against public schools for forcibly subjecting their students to wireless radiation was filed in Portland, Oregon last year. You can read some wildly contrasting views on the suit in this online news article and the comments posted by readers. In those comments, you’ll see the great discrepancy between attitudes in Europe and attitudes in North America.

The contact list on the website for Citizens for Safe Technology, a North American umbrella group, confirms another notable discrepancy – far more women are on top of the issue than men. It seems that the basic social norms that say that males should be comfortable with any technology no matter how dangerous continue to have a great deal of power.

The bottom line is that the ubiquity of wireless radiation in our built environment today is no defense for its presence in schools. In fact, the opposite is true – we all get enough radiation exposure as it is without soaking our biggest public institutions with it, day in and day out, year after year. Like other “facts of modern life,” such as junk food, cigarette smoke, bullying, and images of violence, we should be trying to minimize radiation exposure in schools, not maximize it.

If history is any indication, pervasive WiFi in schools will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas by a court upholding Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

By that time, Hick and Lloyd may be long gone from KPR, leaving taxpayers with the bill to reconfigure our schools’ internet connections. But tomorrow’s court proceedings offer ample evidence that taxpayers’ rights rarely cross their radar screen.

What’s Wrong With WiFi? Dollars and Sense

Ubiquitous internet access has transformed the way humans think and interact in unprecedented ways. As a global population, we are becoming a part of a worldwide cybernetic intelligence as the digital technology industry catalyzes the fastest leap in planetary evolution ever witnessed by humanity. In effect, we all now live inside a giant virtual library, in which almost any bit of information may be accessed by almost anyone, almost anytime, providing a potential for human learning never experienced before.

So what’s wrong with KPR’s pervasive WiFi plan? Isn’t wireless computer access already saturating our environment? Shouldn’t our schools be among the places where such access is easiest to come by?

As is the case with most KPR plans, this one leaves much to be desired when it comes to both dollars and sense.

KPR’s budgets show that the province of Ontario provides about half a million dollars per year for classroom technology. In the past four years, KPR has spent about $7 million on this line item, including a whopping $2.2 million for the purchase and installation of commercial-grade Meru routers, which go for more $1000 each, up to twenty of which might be in a single school. 

KPR also bought class sets of “netbook” computers complete with carts to move them from room to room. Installing a point-source, low-power, household-style router on each cart would have cost $100 a shot – and done the same job sending signals to the netbooks as do the pervasive, high-power routers currently hidden behind ceiling tiles at every KPR school.

This judicious system of turning WiFi signals on only at the time and place of immediate use would have cost a total of $20,000 if every KPR school had two of them – the same price paid by the board for setting up a single school with high-power routers! Indeed, the annual $80,000 maintenance cost of the Meru routers is far higher than the total purchase cost of point-source routers would have been.

Yes, you read that right. KPR could have spent $20,000 making point-source WiFi available in every school. Instead they spent $2 million to flood schools with WiFi radiation from top to bottom, all day long, all year long, need it or not.

Let’s compare the availability of WiFi with hot water in your home. For decades every household had a large hot water tank, a reservoir of heated water at the ready. Eventually somebody figured out it would be ten times more energy-efficient if we just heated the water up when and where we needed it with a tankless, “on-demand” heater – now the first choice of economically-minded homeowners and builders.

While this same “on demand” principle is being used to save energy and money in industrial design across the board, KPR trustees and administrators continues to operate with out-of-date thinking even as they tell us (and themselves) that they’re leaping ahead into the future.

The total technology plan KPR is currently pursuing is expected to cost $13 million, though the board has been especially shy about revealing the details. It doesn’t take a genius to see that KPR can’t actually afford the plan. Indeed, KPR’s long-term debt has been ballooning since Rusty Hick was hired as Director – from $67 million in 2009 to $73 million in 2010 to a whopping $93 million last year – with technology expenses playing a significant part.

Abraham: making magic with $$$

In April 2010, Clarington trustee Cathy Abraham showed the poor judgment for which KPR trustees are rapidly becoming known in participating in a publicly available interview with Robert Martellacci, the head of a private digital technology company. The interview, available here, demonstrates how closely KPR is linked to the behind-the-scenes push to stimulate the corporate economy by shipping as much public money as possible into it. In the podcast, Abraham made her now-famous admission that trustees would have to “make some magic happen during the budget process” to facilitate the massive technology expenditures.

Abraham stated in no uncertain terms that one of the primary motivations for installing pervasive wireless systems is to “allow students to use the technology they already have.” Martellacci responded by mentioning that Research in Motion was planning to double their Blackberry sales to the educational market. Abraham remarked how wonderful it would be if students could simply bring their laptops to school and look up websites during lessons – an opinion strongly suggesting that she has never actually tried to manage a classroom herself. She expressed her confidence that “this is the way of teaching for the future,” and concluded the interview by claiming that in pushing WiFi, trustees are really just responding to students who want to use their hand-held devices in the classroom.

Although Abraham claimed in the interview that KPR’s brave leap into the world of WiFi was independent of Queen’s Park, Premier McGuinty’s comments just a few months later suggest otherwise. McGuinty managed to anger parents by suggesting that cell phones be allowed in classrooms, as reported by the Toronto Star. A poll on the Star’s website the day after McGuinty’s remarks revealed that 93% of respondents thought it a bad idea – for all the obvious reasons. “There’s nothing positive about cell phones or any distractions in the classroom environment,” observed one citizen. A parent working in the technology field wrote that “these devices disconnect us from the spontaneity of human existence.” 

A more recent poll, taken by the Ontario Student Trustees’ Association less than a year after Abraham’s comments, showed that 72% of students in fact didn’t think cell phones should be part of the classroom environment, as reported here.

Kawartha Safe Technology Initiative members believe that the “hidden agenda” behind pervasive WiFi is simply to let school boards off the hook of providing computers at all, eventually obliging all parents to buy their kids laptops and iPhones to take to school. Not only does such a plan exacerbate the differences between upper-class and lower-class children (which public schools were designed to minimize), but also creates new security issues as kids with expensive new devices become targets of theft and violence. Last month, Toronto police chief Bill Blair discussed the problem of cellphone theft at schools, as reported in the Star.

Making matters worse, it’s obvious that pervasive WiFi and hand-held devices will present an impossible management problem for teachers. KSTI rightly argues that this scenario would create “limitless opportunities for cyberbullying, misuse of cell phone cameras, and viewing of pornography.” A CBC documentary on the negative psychological effects of such activities was aired this past winter, hosted by Canadian theatre, literary and media icon Ann-Marie MacDonald. You can watch it here.

Cooke: WiFi is more important than PCVS

Abraham’s fellow Clarington-area trustee and techno-cheerleader Steven Cooke in a frightfully amateurish campaign video posted to YouTube during the last election managed to demonstrate exactly why he shouldn’t have been elected. Luckily for him (and painfully for us), only one other person besides he and Abraham sought the positions, and only one-third of the electorate showed up to vote (as discussed in the post "Why Peterborough Gets Shafted by KPR"). 

Cooke, barely able to enunciate his own “teleprompter” speech, claims that digital technology is “one of the key elements to improving student engagement and success.” He boasts about the $13 million plan, expressing the naive belief that because of its technology investment, KPR will soon be producing the best students and teachers in Ontario. Cooke, who was later removed from the Board for failing to file his campaign finances (but unfortunately was reinstated), appears, like Abraham, to have zero experience in the classroom.

As a post-secondary teacher myself, I noticed more and more students bringing laptops to class after WiFi was installed on my campus. I also noticed that the more students used laptops, the worse their grades got, and the more difficult it became to engender productive classroom discussion.

So I tried an experiment. I banned all electronic devices from my classroom. Contradicting Cooke’s groundless claims, struggling students who had been particularly dependent on laptops instantly improved their grades and level of engagement. Last year I wrote the electronic device ban right into the syllabus. The result? We had the best educational outcomes and most energetic classroom discussions in the six years I’ve been teaching the course.

I’m talking about literature here – one of the areas for which one might think instant classroom access to the internet would be most beneficial. I can only imagine how KPR’s Phys. Ed. teachers feel about being given laptops and WiFi instead of sports equipment – not to mention those teaching woodshop, dance, visual arts, music, drama, French, or any other subject in which accessing information is a low priority compared with actually practicing the tasks at hand while interacting with fellow students or hands-on tools.

Can you imagine what our schools would be like if KPR’s Board of Trustees were staffed by accomplished, retired teachers instead of untrained corporate cheerleaders going on online spending sprees with public money, convinced of their own pedagogical genius?