Kudos for tough justice

And, this time, the justice came from Edward Bearse, an Anoka County judge who is ruling in this case of teacher-student sex allegations.

The details are still being hashed out, but a veteran Stewartville third-grade teacher is accused of inappropriate sexual touching with several students. One of the allegations is that the teacher, a 63-year-old man, used a small stool to have girls sit in front of him so he could rub himself on their backs. A few of the girls passed him a note asking him to stop the behavior; later, those girls went to the principal.

But the tough justice came during the bail hearing. When the teacher's lawyer asked for leniency on the bail conditions so the teacher could continue to be near his grandchildren, the judge denied the request, citing the seriousness of the allegations.

There is no doubt that teachers have been mistakenly, and even falsely, accused of sexual abuse. And it's possible this teacher is among them. A judge's order to stay away from grandkids would be a devastating blow to an otherwise innocent man.

But what if the teacher is guilty? In that case, this teacher needs to be as far as possible from children - his own and others'.

Within the past year, there have been several teacher-student sex cases in this area that have been brought to trial. I've reported on many of them. I even received a call from one of the victims, and that 15-minute conversation remains among the toughest I've ever had - personally or professionally.

And if I've learned one thing from it all, it's that the victims are real. Students who are sexually abused by teachers and authority figures almost always have many years of emotional and psychological pain in front of them. Later, their wives and husbands will cry with them; their therapists will bill them; and the public, by and large, will forget about them.

But judges and other stewards of justice must always keep the victims in mind. And, sometimes, protecting children must come at the expense of the rights of the accused.

If the Stewartville teacher is found innocent and the charges false, he will be owed an apology. But not from the judge, who deserves kudos for erring on the side of caution and protecting children from his harm - even when his decision may be considered by some to be excessive.

A little provincial pride.

As long as we are celebrating (gloating?) in victories over our neighbors on the eastern border (Brett Favre anyone?), here's the latest list of top average ACT scores by state.

For the fifth consecutive year, Minnesota's students have posted the nation's best average ACT score. Iowa ranked second with Wisconsin, Nebraska and South Dakota rounding out the top five. And while only 27 states have a majority of students taking the college entrance exam (many east- and west-coast states still use the SAT), Minnesota's results do show signs that implementing rigorous academic standards and increasing the availability of post-secondary and college-level courses can produce tangible results.

Parents: Begin panicking now.

Have a seat parents. This could be a bit unsettling.

According to this report from OnlineFamily.Norton - a web-management tool that, among other functions, helps parents block certain web content from their children - kids are not quite as naive as we'd like to believe. In the report issued Friday, OnlineFamily details kids' top 100 search terms collected anonymously through Symantec between February and July 2009.

Some on the list are not surprising in the least, and some are actually encouraging. Michael Jackson (11th), Miley Cyrus (15th), Club Penguin (22nd), Amazon (35th) and weather (44th) all ranked in the top 50.

But other search terms are downright terrifying. "Sex" ranked fourth while "porn" was sixth; "Boobs" ranked 28th and "naked girls" ranked a few spots ahead of "Playboy" at 86th. In between were a handful of non-flattering slang terms for genitalia.

Of course, none of the parents out there have searched any of those terms themselves. But if they had, they would have seen that simply typing "sex" into a search bar can yield a host of explicit images, video and audio - much of it without requiring sign-up or registration.

The web is no different than any other public space where children need to be supervised. But unfortunately, there are no security guards and there is no 911 in cyberspace. Dangers and strangers are allowed to roam the web unchecked - which makes parents the best (and only) police.

Supervise wisely.