Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school, authorities said.

Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.

The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.

Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.

When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student’s backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined. Students were escorted to a nearby playing field, and parents were called and told they could come pick up their children.

A MAST robot took pictures of the device and X-rays were evaluated. About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said.

Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device.

Both the student and his parents were “very cooperative” with authorities, Luque said. He said fire officials also went to the student’s home and checked the garage to make sure items there were neither harmful nor explosive.

“There was nothing hazardous at the house,” Luque said.

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said.

“There will be no (criminal) charges whatsoever,” Luque said.

Police and fire officials also will not seek to recover costs associated with responding to the incident, the spokesman said.

Luque said both the student and his parents were extremely upset.

“He was very shaken by the whole situation, as were his parents,” Luque said.

The school is located on Carolina Lane near Hilltop Drive.

Adjacent Gompers Charter Middle School was not affected during the incident, police Sgt. Ray Battrick said.

Millennial Middle School opened in fall 2008. It is part of the San Diego Unified School District.

via Science project prompts SD school evacuation – SignOnSanDiego.com. Hat Tip: Boing Boing

Comments:

• Thomas Edison would have been jailed long before he invented anything. As a creative force in the world, American culture is dead. Genius will only be defined as deviancy outside the darlings of Liberalism. Fear is being nurtured and promoted and it will choke out creativity.
• The fact this happened in a magnet school with “Tech” in its name is another fulfilled Orwell prophecy: the name denotes the opposite of what it will actually promote.
• Notice how every civil tax-feeder took this bizarre suspicion with grave seriousness; you can’t blame this on one idiotic decision-maker.  How can anyone think that an empty container can explode?
• Note that the story reports on the decision not to file false charges against the victims of harassment, and to not charge them for their ill-treatment, without any sign of how ludicrous it would be to do so.  We live at the mercy of our bureaucratic masters and any time they don’t destroy us, we must see them as magnanimous.
• There is no fix for the United States.  If people are such idiotic cowards on such a wide scale, there is no way to craft a regulation that will dictate sanity.  The only thing one can do is “be the change one wants to see in the world” and try to teach people disciplines of rationality when they are open to our influence.  I don’t see any quick exit from the coming night.