Tech-savvy kids breach security, cause recall in iPad project for L.A. schools

Editor’s note: The Los Angeles Unified School District is not scrapping its iPad program, as an earlier version of this story stated.

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s $1 billion project to put an iPad in the hand of all its students is off to a rocky start: a security program its technology experts installed has been worked around by tech-savvy students, who have been using it to access restricted content. School officials are now attempting to collect many of the iPads it distributed. There are about 30,000 of them, Hot Air reported.

The iPad plan was originally embarked upon as a means of cutting costs from textbooks and classroom documents. The idea was that if students had iPads — and those devices were coded so that students could only access what teachers wanted them to view via preloaded educational software — then the upfront technology costs would soon be recouped.

Unfortunately, students quickly broke through the code, and within hours they were able to access unauthorized sites, including Facebook, YouTube and other social media outlets.

If only school officials had listened to Sarah Bradshaw, chief of staff for District 5 of the LAUSD, who told ABC News: “We could see this thing coming. So much of this has been rushed and so ill-thought-out.”