A former Triton High School teacher pleaded guilty Thursday in relation to a sex-with-students scandal at the school in Camden County, N.J.

Former Triton High School Nick Martinelli, 28, of Cherry Hill, pleaded guilty Thursday to a fourth-degree count of hindering apprehension. In court he admitted to impeding the progress of investigators looking into an improper relationship he later admitted to having with a Triton student, according to a press release from Camden County Prosecutor's Office spokesman Jason Laughlin.

As part of his plea Martinelli isn't allowed to have contact with the former student and must forfeit his teaching certificate. He will receive a year of probation when he is sentenced on April 12, according to Laughlin.

Two other former teachers, Jeff Logandro, 32, of Blackwood, N.J. and Daniel Michielli, 27, also of Blackwood, both pleaded guilty in February to third-degree conspiracy to commit official misconduct after they carried on improper physical relationships with students that they held authority over, Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk announced in a press release at the time.

Both Logandro and Michielli will be sentenced Friday, prosecutors said.

Former Triton principal Catherine DePaul, 55, of Woodbury also pleaded guilty in February to a disorderly person charge of failure to report a crime, after she didn't report the teachers' alleged abuses to law enforcement, prosecutors said.

"It's obvious there existed a culture at Triton High School whereby teachers thought they could get away with improper relationships with their students and administrators turned a blind eye," Faulk said after the educators were arrested last year.

Prosecutors say that in April 2012 that a Triton student alerted a substitute teacher that teachers were having sex with students. In turn, that teacher told DePaul but prosecutors say that the principal failed to report the allegations to law enforcement.

As part of her plea, DePaul agreed to forfeit her job, never hold a public job in New Jersey again and serve one year of probation, prosecutors said.

The school’s vice principal, Jernee Kollock, still face charges.

Randal Franzen was 53, unemployed and nearly broke when his brother, a tool designer at Boeing, mentioned that pilots for remotely piloted aircraft – more commonly known as drones – were in high demand. 

Franzen, a former professional skier and trucking company owner who had flown planes as a hobby, started calling manufacturers and found three schools that offer bachelor’s degrees for would-be feet-on-the-ground fliers: Kansas State University, the University of North Dakota and the private Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. 

He landed at Kansas State, where he maintained a 4.0 grade point average for four years and accumulated $60,000 in student loan debt before graduating in 2011. It was a gamble, but one that paid off with an offer “well into the six figures” as a flight operator for a military contractor in Afghanistan.

Franzen, who dreams of one day piloting drones over forest fires in the U.S., believes he is at the forefront of a watershed moment in aviation, one in which manned flight takes a jumpseat to the remote-controlled variety.

Courtesy Randal Franzen

Randal Franzen went from being unemployed to earning a six-figure salary as a drone flight operator in Afghanistan.

While most jobs flying drones currently are military-related, universities and colleges expect that to change by 2015, when the Federal Aviation Administration is due to release regulations for unmanned aircraft in domestic airspace. Once those regulations are in place, the FAA predicts that 10,000 commercial drones will be operating in the U.S. within five years.

Although just three schools currently offer degrees in piloting unmanned aircraft, many others – including community colleges – offer training for remote pilots. And those numbers figure are set to increase, with some aviation industry analysts predicting drones will eventually come to dominate the U.S. skies in terms of jobs.   

At the moment, 358 public institutions – including 14 universities and colleges – have permits from the FAA to fly unmanned aircraft. Those permits became public last summer after the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

The government issues the permits mainly for research and border security. Police departments that have requested them to survey dense, high crime areas have been rejected.

Some of the schools that have permits have been flying unmanned aircrafts for decades; others, like Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, received theirs recently to start programs to train future drone pilots.

Alex Mirot, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle who oversees the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Science program there, said this generation of students will pioneer how unmanned aircraft are used domestically, as the use of drones shifts from almost purely military to other applications.

“We make it clear from the beginning that we are civilian-focused,” said Mirot, a former Air Force pilot who remotely piloted Predator and Reaper drones used to target suspected terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere for four years from a base in Nevada.

“We want them to think about how to apply this military hardware to civilian applications.”

Among the possible applications: Monitoring livestock and oil pipelines, spotting animal poachers, tracking down criminals fleeing crime scenes and delivering packages for UPS and FedEx.

With U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan winding down, drone manufacturers also are eager to find new markets. AeroVironment, a California company that specializes in small, unmanned aircrafts for the military, recently unveiled the Qube, a drone designed for law enforcement surveillance.

The FAA hasn’t allowed police agencies to fly drones over populated areas – because of concerns about airspace safety, as drones have crashed or collided with one another abroad. But that hasn’t stopped some agencies from buying them in anticipation of their eventual approval. The Seattle Police Department, for example, has two small aircraft, which two officers occasionally fly around a warehouse for practice. For now, a police spokesman said, federal rules are too restrictive to use them outside. 

The domestic market is so nascent that there isn’t even agreement on what to call unmanned aircraft – “remotely piloted aircraft,” “unmanned aerial vehicles” – UAVs – or by the most mainstream term, “drones.” The latter makes many advocates bristle; they say the term confuses their aircraft with the dummy planes used for target practice – or with the controversial planes used to kill suspected terrorists abroad.

Industry attracting engineers and pilots
Students at Embry-Riddle train on flight simulators that closely resemble the Predator, an armed military drone with a 48-foot wingspan, because the FAA will not issue a drone license to a private institution.

Without guidance from the FAA, Embry-Riddle has struggled with how to create a robust program that will turn out employable graduates.

“As of now there aren’t rules on what an (unmanned aircraft) pilot qualification will be,” Mirot said. “You have to go to employer X and ask them, ‘What are you requiring?’ And that becomes the standard.”

The bachelor’s degree program also includes 13 credits in engineering, so students understand the plane’s whole system, Mirot said.

Embry-Riddle recently graduated its first student with a bachelor’s degree, but those who graduated earlier with minors in unmanned aircraft systems have fared well, Mirot said.

“I had a kid who deployed right away and he was making $140,000,” Mirot said. “That’s more than I ever made. Yeah, he’s going into Afghanistan, but he had no previous military experience or security clearance.”

Mirot said many of his students aspire to be airline pilots. But with salaries for commercial airline pilots starting as low as $17,000 in the first year, they plan to start in unmanned systems to pay off their loans, then maybe apply for an airline job, he said.

The University of North Dakota, which launched its unmanned aircraft systems operations major in 2009, has similar success stories. Professor Alan Palmer, a retired brigadier general of the North Dakota National Guard, said 15 of the program’s 23 graduates now work for General Atomics in San Diego, which makes the Predator and Reaper drones used in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Engineering and computer science students, too, are in demand by the drone industry. At least 50 universities in the U.S. have centers, academic programs or clubs for drone engineering or flying. Many of the engineering students work on projects making the drones “smarter” – that is building more sensitive sensors – and studying how the robots interact with humans.

George Huang, a professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, who builds drones the size of hummingbirds, said nearly all his 20 students work as researchers for the Air Force. This means they’re earning between $60,000 and $80,000 a year while still enrolled, instead of the $15,000 stipend that graduate students typically receive from their schools.

At the University of Colorado in Boulder, doctoral candidate Sibylle Walter said unmanned systems appeal to her because the results are immediate. In the past, she said, aerospace students typically ended up at Boeing or another big company and spent years working on one element of a project. Instead, she is working with her adviser to build a supersonic drone capable of flying up to 1,000 mph.

“The link between education and application is much more compact,” Walter said of the unmanned aircraft. “That translates to this new boom. You can build them inexpensively – you don’t need $100 million to build one.”

Ethical warfare?
Despite the promise of numerous civilian applications, drones continue to be controversial because of their role as weapons of war.

At Texas A&M University, which has an FAA permit to fly drones, computer science student Brittany Duncan is unusual among her peers: She’s a licensed pilot, a computer scientist and a woman. She probably could land a high-paying job for a military contractor, but she’s intent on staying in academia, studying robot-human relations, specifically how robots should approach victims of a natural disaster without scaring them.

John Brecher / NBC News

Doctoral candidate Brittany Duncan assembles an unmanned aerial vehicle in a lab at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

On a recent hot, dusty morning, Duncan, 25, pulled a small aircraft from the back of a 4x4 pickup. Wearing black work boots and Dickies, she quickly assembled a remote-controlled aircraft that resembled a flying spider, then launched the aircraft – equipped with sensors and a video camera – over a pile of rubble to practice capturing footage.

At her side was Professor Robin Murphy, her adviser and a veteran of real-world unmanned aircraft operations, having flown over the World Trade Center after 9/11, the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, Japan, after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster there (although she stayed in Tokyo). She believes drones could revolutionize public safety.

“I could show you a photo of firefighters from today, and it could be a photo of firefighters from 1944,” Murphy said. “They haven’t had a lot of boost in technology. [Unmanned aircraft] could be a real game-changer.”

Duncan knows there is resistance from communities where drones have been introduced. In Seattle, for example, the ACLU argued that drones could invade privacy. But as Duncan sees it, this makes her work even more relevant.

“That’s the most important thing to me – that people understand good can come from drones,” Duncan said. “Every technology is scary at first. Cars, when they went only 6 mph, people thought there would be a rash of people getting run over. Well, no, it’s going slow enough for you to get out of the way. And it’ll change your life.”

Duncan said she considers the implications of working on machines that are for now mostly used for war. Despite conflicting reports on civilian casualties in drone strikes, she’s convinced that unmanned aircraft offer a more-ethical battlefield alternative because they take the pilot’s “skin” out of the game. 

“If you’re flying a UH-60 Blackhawk Helicopter and look down and think someone has a surface-to-air missile, you’re going to shoot first and figure it out later because you’re a pilot and your life is in danger,” she said. But with drones, “(You) can afford to make sure that someone is a combatant before they engage – because you don’t have your life on the line. It takes your emotion out of the equation.”

While that debate continues, the Department of Defense is showing no loss of appetite for drones, despite the drawdown in Afghanistan. This year, it plans to spend $4.2 billion on various versions of the unmanned aircraft, 15 times more than it did in 2000.

For Professors Mirot and Palmer, that is evidence that their programs will stay relevant, no matter how the domestic deployment of drones plays out.

Looking ahead
There is an ironic twist to Randal Franzen’s move to climb aboard the cutting edge of aviation: When he went to Afghanistan, he learned that his assignment was to monitor surveillance video from a tethered balloon near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – a military technology that – minus the cameras – dates to the Civil War.

From the base miles away, he monitored the rural area for Taliban activity, but mostly watched Afghans going about their daily lives. The retrained drone pilot said he found it fascinating.

“I grew up in Montana, swam in irrigation ditches, and they do the exact same thing – they’re just trying to make a living, raise some cattle and kids and do the exact same thing as everyone else,” Franzen said. There were moments that caught him by surprise – such as when he saw a man leading 10 camels through the desert while talking on a cellphone, walking several feet ahead of his wife, who was dressed in a full burqa.

Now home in Colorado, Franzen figures he’ll take at least one more far-flung military assignment as he waits for the domestic drone market to open. This time, though, he’d like to put his newfound remote flying skills to better use. 

“I had three offers yesterday to go back and do the same thing for three different companies,” he said. “I talked to them about flying. I’d rather pilot something. I’d like to go play with something cooler.”

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Cheating, lying and stealing among American students are all less prevalent nowadays, according to a new report.

The 2012 "Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth" suggests that young people's morals have improved in recent years. The survey, conducted every two years by the Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute of Ethics, found that 99 percent of the 23,000 high school students sampled say they believe "it is very important to have good moral character."

The results found 51 percent of students in 2012 admitted they cheated on an exam in the past year, which is down from 59 percent in 2010. The percentage of students admitting they've copied another's homework dropped by two points in the past couple years.

"Changes in children’s behavior of this magnitude suggest a major shift in parenting and school involvement in issues of honesty and character," Michael Josephson, founder and president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, said in a statement. "Though there is still far too much cheating, lying and stealing, I think we have turned the corner."

Related: Feds say teachers hired stand-in to take their certification tests

The survey also suggest there are fewer Pinocchios: Fifty-five percent of students in 2012 say they've lied to a teacher in the past year about something significant, compared with 61 percent in 2010.

Students admitting they stole something from a store in the past year fell seven percentage points in the last two years, to 20 percent in 2012.

While Josephson believes the results are "a small ray of sunshine shining through lots of dark clouds," this report comes in the midst of a number of recent cheating scandals among students a little bit older.

At least 78 Air Force Academy cadets have been accused of cheating on an online calculus test by allegedly getting help during the exam from a website.

Even the Ivy League has not been immune to moral lapses. It was recently reported that dozens of students at Harvard University were being investigated for possibly sharing answers or plagiarizing on a final exam.

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A lot of young people cheat because they're under pressure to get ahead and succeed, according to David Callahan, senior fellow at New York City-based public policy center Demos.

"Students are worried about getting left behind in this economy," said Callahan, who's also author of "The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Do Well."

In fact, 45 percent of the boys and 28 percent of the girls in the Josephson survey believe that "a person has to lie and cheat at least occasionally in order to succeed."

"It’s still a big problem," Callahan told NBC News. "There’s been a decline, but it’s not a huge decline."

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Privacy's last stand is taking place not far from The Alamo in Texas right now, to hear some people tell it. Two schools in San Antonio have begun tracking students using radio-enabled computer chips embedded in their ID cards, allowing administrators to know the precise whereabouts of their charges on campus -- be it in class, in the bathroom, in a stairwell or AWOL -- all while sitting at a computer.  

The stated purpose of the so-called RFID ID cards is simple: Because state aid is based on attendance, and the chips help schools count kids, tracking equals funding. The district also says the technology makes kids safer.

But at the intersection of technology, parenting, schools and privacy rights, things frequently get messy. Are schools merely modernizing, or are they teaching children to silently accept a Big Brother state? Should parents be happy that teachers can more easily keep tabs on their kids, or should they worry that vast databases of detailed location information might one day harm the children?

Technology with potential privacy implications is shoehorning its way into schools around the country, creating thorny issues at every turn.

Should district be allowed to demand middle-schooler's Facebook password?

Before San Antonio's implementation, Houston ran a trial in 2010 and found the RFID ID cards did in fact help boost attendance figures. RFID tracking has also been tried in California, where one preschool embeds chips in kids' clothes. Biometrics -- usually fingerprints -- have been used by some schools. In Carroll Country, Md., some kids now flash their palms instead of cash to pay for food. And the Daily Princetonian earlier this month revealed that new keyless locks opened by ID cards installed in dorm rooms feed a central database that records each time students enter buildings and rooms. University officials responded to the story the way every school does -- and nearly every data collection authority does -- by saying officials don't monitor the data but they reserve the right to access it in an emergency.

Children desensitized to being watched?
The definition of an emergency can be dicey, however, and that logic has already led to some celebrated privacy and technology lawsuits. Several districts around the nation have run into trouble for demanding students' social media passwords or asking to rummage through kids' cellphones without a warrant. 

A few parents in San Antonio are putting up a stink about the RFID cards, arguing that schools shouldn't be a playground for new privacy-invading technologies. A group calling itself "Chip Free Schools" has tried to organize opposition. Another parent is objecting on religious grounds.

Gov't agencies, colleges demand applicants' Facebook passwords

Chip Free Schools has received support from a larger privacy advocacy group -- Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN, which was formed more than 10 years ago to protest the proliferation of supermarket loyalty cards.

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"RFID is used to track factory inventory and monitor farm animals," said Dr. Katherine Albrecht, director of CASPIAN. "Schools, of all places, should be teaching children how to participate in a free democratic society, not conditioning them to be tracked like cattle."

Of course, the fight against loyalty cards didn't get very far, and privacy concerns may take a back seat as schools are tempted by new technologies that help them manage their districts, warns Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

It's often hard to see the long-term privacy issues created by technology through the fog created by short-term gains, he warned. Location tracking can have a chilling effect on casual congregating, for example -- kids who consider forming a club may skip the idea once they are aware that administrators will know about every meeting. 

"The consequences of tracking are that as people become more aware they are being tracked, they become less free," he said.

There's also concern that students who learn to accept tracking as teen-agers will enter adulthood desensitized to being watched by government agencies.

"Schools shape children not just by what they tell them, but also what we demonstrate to them," he said. "We don't want to see the next generation of citizens growing up thinking about this kind of invisible eye in the sky."

'Prisoners in their own schools'
There are also several practical problems with tracking students and collecting data on them, Stanley warned.  The practice can provide a false sense of security, for example, as kids might find a way to separate themselves from their RFID chips ("As a parent, I would wonder, do they know where your kid is, or do they know where your kid's chip is?" Stanley said). While the data might be collected for one use -- paying for lunch -- there might be mission creep. One day, it could be used as part of an adjudication procedure to find witnesses to a fight, for example. Long term, perhaps it will end up in the hands of political operatives, forcing a future presidential candidate to explain why he missed so many history classes. There's some concern -- theoretical at this point -- that the radio signal sent by the chip or the data collected could be stolen by others who might harm children. And there are worries about the cost.

NBC News' Charles Hadlock on the school's controversial use of tracking technology

"You should ask, 'Is this just a gimmicky solution to a problem that's been solved already, like using lunch money,’ and the funds might be better spent on education?’ " he said.

Katie Deolloz, who is helping coordinating RFID ID card opposition for CASPIAN, argued that the switch to an RFID card was really motivated by money.

"Students deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, not forced to wear microchips that track them like cattle," she said. "(The district) has spent upward of $500,000 solving a non-problem. Relying on RFID to track and monitor students during the school day shifts the burden of responsibility away from the administrators and teachers. (The district) needs to be in the business of educating children, not treating them like prisoners in their own schools."

Failing to provide Facebook password gets teacher's aide fired

Stanley concedes that parents confronted with tracking technology at schools might have a very different reaction than privacy advocates. Many already pay cellphone providers so they can use mobile GPS tracking tools to keep tabs on their children. Parents also tend to keep kids much closer at hand then they did a generation ago, when it was common for kids to spend entire days biking around the neighborhood unsupervised. When concerns about school tracking are raised, they sometimes respond with a simple shrug. 

Meanwhile, school officials point out that students have reduced civil rights when on campus. According to school spokesman Pascual Gonzalez, the kids have no right to privacy at school.

"During the school day, when they are within our four walls, we've got to know where those kids are," he said. "We reject the argument (that their privacy is being invaded). People saying that are not charged with the safety of children."

He dismissed the idea that the cards represent a tracking device, calling it instead a "locator."

"There is nobody sitting at a bank of monitors looking at a bunch of dots on a computer screen," he said. "We only go and look for a student when we have reason to.|

Implementation of the RFID pilot program -- which involves 4,200 students at two of the district's 112 schools -- has gone on without a hitch, he said. 

So far, it appears parents are buying the district's argument. Gonzalez says only two district families are opposing the cards. If those students continue to refuse to wear the cards, they are subject to being kicked out of school, he said.

Stanley said he's not surprised at the lack of protest from parents. Many have become much more comfortable with the technology, and there is an apparent lack of consequences stemming from its use. There are no tales of sexual predators hacking databases of kids' fingerprints, no evil school principals who've posted detailed charts of kids' whereabouts on their Facebook page. So when the cost-benefit analysis is presented, it's hard to spell out that cost.

"With privacy, the issue is almost like the environment. We have to ask what kind of society we want to create long term," he said. "These things do have a very real effect on our freedom, but it's very gradual and often very subtle."

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Nearly a third of the students at Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park, Calif., have missed class since last Thursday as a highly contagious gastrointestinal virus makes its way around the school.

Parent Melinda Pittler carries a bottle of waterless hand sanitizer with her wherever she goes. She and other parents at the Oak Park school started carrying the germ-killing liquid since the norovirus began spreading through the school last week.

So far, some 320 students have called out sick. On Monday alone, 90 kids were absent.

“My daughter’s friend is home with it right now, we think,” Pittler said. “I’m concerned. It’s going around very quickly.”

Ventura County health officials believe some of the 320 sick calls to Medea Creek Middle School were made as a precaution to avoid becoming ill. Some adults at the school have also been sickened by the virus, the origin of which is under investigation. Officials are probing the possibility that it could be related to food contamination.

Read the original report  |  More from NBCLosAngeles.com 

Norovirus causes stomach, intestines or both to get inflamed and can cause diarrhea, vomiting, nausea and stomach pains, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It spreads quickly through contact with the virus, which can live on surfaces, in contaminated water and food, and in the air.

The virus can lead to dehydration. Young children, older adults and people with other illnesses are most vulnerable to the virus. Most people who contract norovirus get better within one to three days.

Those sickened with the virus are contagious for at least 48 hours after symptoms go away, according to the CDC.

Health officials say hand washing and general cleanliness are the best ways to protect against the virus.

It’s suspected that a single student, who became ill last Tuesday, may have introduced the virus to Medea Creek Middle School simply by being with others in the cafeteria.

So far, the virus has only been reported at Medea Creek but health officials are warning residents – especially families and siblings of Medea Creek students – to clean surfaces at home with disinfectant and wash their hands thoroughly and often.

Student Ofek Schmoof says he washes his hands several times a day at his mother’s advisement. The Schmoof family says they’ll continue that habit, especially with the norovirus making the rounds.

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According to a letter sent home to parents, desks, doors and other surfaces at the school are being sanitized daily and hand sanitizers are available in every classroom. A school dance planned for Friday was cancelled so a large group would not gather, potentially spreading the virus.

“There's a bunch of hand sanitizer and when I go to the bathroom there is a lot of soap over there,” Schmoof said. “They just want everyone to be clean.”

No hospitalizations have been reported among the students or staff at Medea Creek, and there are no plans to close the school.

Some parents of Los Angeles Unified School District students say their children or their children's classmates have contracted norovirus, though the district had not issued a health warning as of Monday, according to Daryl Strickland with LAUSD.

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A 22-year-old student fell 11 stories from a residence hall at Washington State University in Pullman and survived, according to a university spokesman.

The student fell from an 11th-story window of a room in Orton Hall about 10 p.m. Wednesday, the website of campus radio station KQQQ reported.

University spokesman Darin Watkins told the Spokane Spokesman-Review that the male junior was flown by helicopter to Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane.

“It’s almost miraculous he’s alive and we’re really hoping for the best,” Watkins told the newspaper.

The Spokesman-Review said that trees beside the building broke the student’s fall and that he landed in grass. The student was conscious when emergency crews got there, the report said.

Campus police said alcohol was not involved.

It was the fourth fall this semester involving students at WSU or the nearby University of Idaho, according to KQQQ and the Spokesman-Review.

WSU is a public university based in Pullman in eastern Washington about 75 miles south of Spokane near the Idaho state line. There are about 21,000 students on the Pullman campus.

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Charlotte Observer

Teacher Jeffrey Leardini in an undated photo.

A North Carolina school district agreed to pay $680,000 to a former teacher who said he was unfairly forced to resign after several students accused him of improperly touching them.

Sixth-grade teacher Jeffrey Leardini said he had been coerced into resigning in April 2006 — despite an excellent eight-year record as a teacher — after several students came forward with complaints that he touched them in sexually suggestive ways.

Criminal charges against Leardini brought by one student at Community House Middle School were later dismissed, and the other complaints, made by several of her friends, were discredited as an effort to punish the teacher on behalf of their friend, who was doing poorly in Leardini’s class.

According to the Charlotte Observer, Leardini acknowledged that he squeezed shoulders, patted arms and touched students' heads as part of his teaching style.

In his lawsuit, filed in June 2009, Leardini charged that a human resources employee for the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district falsely claimed the district had a "no touch" rule and misled him into believing he had no choice but to resign immediately or be terminated, and that he only later learned that he had the right to an investigation of the girls' complaints before losing his job.

In February, a jury agreed that he had been deprived of due process and awarded him damages of $1.1 million from the school district and just over $52,000 from the human resources employee, Kay Cunningham, who no longer works for the school district.

The Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district appealed the decision, maintaining that Leardini resigned voluntarily.

In the settlement reached Aug. 24, the school district agreed to pay Leardini $680,000.

The school district also agreed to change Leardini’s record from "resignation in lieu of dismissal," which made him ineligible for rehire, to voluntary resignation. "Any reference to termination or suspension will be removed," it says.

Leardini now lives in San Diego and works for Petco, according to his LinkedIn page.

His attorney, Luke Largess, told the Charlotte Observer that the settlement averted the possibility of a new trial.

He said Leardini’s successful claim would make school boards more cautious about their handling of complaints against teachers.

Largess said "it has given them pause" about rushing to force accused employees to resign, the Observer reported.

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Less than a week before the school year is set to begin, a pair of 15-year-old students was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder after police say they were involved in planning "serious threats" against students and staff at Vista Murrieta High School in Murrieta, Calif.

The teens were identified as Reed Peery and Samuel Noble, according to John Hall, with the Riverside District Attorney's office. Hall told the Press-Enterprise that even though the students are minors, California law permits their names be released because they have been arrested on suspicion of a "serious crime."

One of the students allegedly spoke of the plot during an online conversation with someone on the East Coast, said Karen Parris, spokeswoman for the high school. That person notified their local law enforcement, which then notified the FBI.

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"Thank you for stepping forward, you know, thank you for doing your part to protect our children and the city," Cathy Bearse, parent, said referring to the tipster.

In their alleged plans, the boys mentioned a specific date but it was "not in the near future," Parris said. The two would-be sophomores are facing disciplinary action, but Parris said she could not go into details.

The students were arrested on Wednesday and booked into Southwest Juvenile Hall, said Lt. Tony Conrad, with Murrieta police.

Conrad said the FBI and Temecula Sheriff’s Department tipped off police on Aug. 8 that the boys, both residents of Murrieta, were allegedly making online threats against the 3,350-student campus, which is scheduled to start classes on Tuesday, Aug. 21.

Also at NBCLosAngeles.com: Is body that of missing diver?

Parents were notified on Friday of the alleged threats by an automated phone message sent by Vista Murrieta Principal Darren Daniel, Parris said. The school is planning a safety meeting for next week to address the incident.

"We’re all trying to figure out how we can better secure our children at the school and how to prevent something from happening like in Columbine," said Max Martinez, parent.

On his Facebook page, one of the suspects, Peery, lists "Zero Day" -- a film based on the Columbine school shooting -- among his favorite movies.

The case has been sent to the Riverside District Attorney’s Office for review, Conrad said.

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Forget images of students weighed down by 40-pound book bags and spending most of their time on homework, says a Washington-based think tank.

Students say school is too easy, according to a Center for American Progress examination of federal  survey data.

It’s more than pupils whining about classrooms being boring, Ulrich Boser, who co-authored the center’s report, told msnbc.com.

Among key findings in the report, “Do Schools Challenge Our Students,” by the center, which is often aligned with the Obama administration and progressives on policy matters:

• More than a third of high-school seniors report that they hardly ever write about what they read in class.
• Nearly three out of four (72 percent) eighth-grade science students say they aren’t being taught engineering and technology.
• Almost a third of eighth-grade students report reading fewer than five pages a day either in school or for homework.

Center for American Progress

Ulrich Boser, co-author of the Center for American Progress report on

“Students are not being prepared, by and large, for the global economy,” Boser said.

The solution may be found in the higher, tougher standards contained in the Common Core, a program adopted by 45 states but criticized by some as federal overreach, he said.

“They ratchet up standards for all students,” Boser said.

The center delved into the federal data after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released findings in its Measures of Effective Teaching Project in 2011, that student feedback was a far better predictor of a teacher’s performance than more traditional indicators of success, such as whether a teacher had a master’s degree or not.

Tiffany Francis, a second-grade teacher at Pittsburgh King, The Teaching Institute, a public K-8 school in Pittsburgh, said she planned to “give students a voice within my classroom.”

The nine-year classroom veteran participated Tuesday morning in the center's news conference in Washington, where the report was released.

She received results of her first student-perception survey about three weeks ago, Francis told msnbc.com. Data showed kids want to be heard more, she said.

“That will help me in my planning and teaching strategies,” she said.

She said her district pushes students to dig deeper in their explanations of math problems.

“Not just 5+5=10, but show me what that means,” she said. “In reading, we’re not getting opinion and feedback and thoughts; we’re not asking them to dig as deep as they do for math,” she said.

She said she ties her lessons to her students’ backgrounds.

“I make my lessons relevant, differentiating my instruction. Learning is embedded within them, they become better learners, excited to learn.”

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GARLAND, Texas -- High school students have raised $10,000 for the family of a convenience store clerk, known as "Grandma" to many in the Garland community, who was set on fire during a robbery attempt.

Nancy Harris, 76, died Friday night, nearly a week after the attack at the Fina gas station where she worked in South Garland.

On Saturday, students from South Garland High School returned to the place of the attack to hold a car wash and raise money for her family.

Read the original report at NBCDFW.com

"I was just devastated. Its kind of outlandish that someone would go out of their way to do this," said Dylan Stooksberry, president of the school's student council. "To have that happen to someone who you know, to a face that you know, to a friend, it's devastating." 

"It hurts deep down and honestly if someone is going to go out of their way to do something bad like that, I am going to go out of my way to do something nice," said Stooksberry.

The Fina gas station is just a block from their school. Many students, like DJ Valderrama, personally knew Harris.

"I came in the gas station and she showed me so much kindness by giving me a free drink," Valderrama said. "Whenever somebody shows you that kind of kindness if affects your life, really."

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Despite the tragedy on Sunday at the Fina gas station, many students told NBC 5 that the incident has brought the community closer together.

Many hoped this fundraiser will help honor Harris.

"I know Ms. Harris is looking down on us right now, I know she is happy," said Valderrama.

Matthew Johnson is charged with attempted capital murder in connection with this case. Those charges could be upgraded because Ms. Harris has died.

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