Thank you for standing up and saying this. Most of this page is filled with random 'THE VICE PRINCIPLE IS THE SUXXORZ RAWR!' rants which have sadly spilled on to the local news page (many of the comments on that page are in fact copied verbatim here on slashdot).
The description for the 'project' is quite vague, though it is described as a motion detector. I am under the impression that this is a inquisitive child's attempt at making a 'motion detector' the same way he might make a fire truck out of a cardboard box. People keep saying how the vice-principle should have known better, but there are certainly 11 year-olds that are capable of constructing explosives. With the obvious exception of things-that-do-nothing, explosives are probably the easiest project to make, and its highly plausible that amongst the student population of a tech school that you'd find students capable of making such a project.
For all the people slamming the vice-principle let me pose the following mental experiment: (1) imagine a gatorade bottle with random wire and IC chips glued to the surface (2) imagine an actual explosive device constructed by an 11-year old. If those objects look drastically different in your mind then you've been watching too much television. A high-school buddy of mine does bomb disposal for a PD down in Georgia and he has plenty of stories about real bombs that look like a someone spun a pitchfork in the bargain bin at a local electronics shop and covered the thing in hot glue.
Yes it sounds like things got out of hand, yes the school should probably plan and highly publicize how such an event will be handled in the future, but good grief stop screaming at people that had make a judgment call with the possible danger to several hundred students on the line.
