Common Core symposium Thursday

What is all the ruckus about data-mining, collecting information on schoolchildren?

It has been going on since Common Core was initiated in 2010, said Fallon resident and opponent to Common Core, Jim Falk, and it has grown exponentially since then to the point that Nevada schools are now providing hand-held devices to students under the 1:1 program, ostensibly to assist in their education, but also used to facilitate the collecting of information about the children.

John Eppolito of Incline Village will be at the Fallon Convention Center on Thursday at 7 p.m. to describe the dangers of the 1:1 program and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium testing. Eppolito has had a running battle with Washoe County School District during the past three years to learn what information it is holding, and possibly disseminating to others, and his four children.

Falk said Tom Considine of Fallon, an expert on personal identity theft, will be on at the convention center to point out the impossibility of keeping personal data absolutely secure once it is collected and stored.

Falk said these devices can be monitored to collect data that will be stored and used at any time in the future, even throughout the individual’s life, to learn whatever the holder of that information desires to learn.

Such data mining was also made possible by the SBAC testing that was such a fiasco last spring, he said.

Falk encourages parents to attend this town hall meeting to learn what is happening to their children in the name of education reform.