One of the worst education stories I've read

A blogger from Detroit who has a fascination with photographing abandoned buildings came upon a middle school building abandoned in 2007. I was browsing his photos of the library (it would rip out the heart of any librarian) and then found this horror story. He could find no one who cared, so he's destroying the stash himself.

"After my first visit to the shattered middle school, I am haunted by what I found in one office: hundreds of file folders containing student psychological examinations complete with social security numbers, addresses, and parent information. I sat and thumbed through them. Many contained detailed histories of physical and sexual abuse, stories of home lives so horrifying I still can't get them out of my head: sibling rape, torture, neglect that defies belief. The detailed reports explained emotional impairments, learning disabilities. There was another box full of IEPs. The dates revealed that many of these students are still in the school system somewhere. I found several of their faces in the 2007 yearbook.

I spend the next few months trying to track down someone who cares. I send e-mails to the school's former principal, offering to go back and collect these records for her or destroy them. She never responds. I call my mom, a retired special education teacher and erstwhile administrator to determine the extent of malfeasance. Then I call the school district's legal department and leave voice mails warning them of the liability of this gross violation of student privacy. I never receive a response. I track down the school psychologist to some address in Troy. Nothing. It turns out a daily newspaper reported abandoned records like these within many of the 33 schools closed in 2007 and the district did nothing. No one is responsible. Someone else was supposed to destroy them. The company that had been paid to secure the school never did its job."

It's enough to make you homeschool, isn't it? And to cry for those poor, pitiful children that no school, no matter how good, will ever be able to save. But what excuses do the adults--the administrators of Detroit's school system have? They took the tax money to teach, test, classify and pigeon hole the children, and then abused them yet one more time. I'm ill. I'm sorry I read this.