I don't know about the rest of the country, but this fails entirely to be surprising [eta: given the region of the country I grew up in, Texas]. My family has seen too much shit go on in schools.

The most egregious case that happened -to us- was a school that put one of my siblings in a fucked-up experiment (paid for by a grant!) without my parents' consent, and indeed told all the children involved not to tell their parents or bad things would happen to them (we grew up being taught very firmly to question authority, so of course my parents found out, and a shitstorm was raised - with nothing ultimately happening. One of several reasons we moved out of that school district.). The experiment involved shit like telling the (extremely young) children to imagine they were in a crashing airplane, and there's nothing they could do, they were going to die, and how did they feel about this?

Some of it seems exaggerated, but the basics - half-assed school grants funding ridiculous shit - ring a little too true to me to outright reject the post. I've seen too many things happen in schools that remain completely unreported on, like prayer in school, to think that the scarcity of information on the internet means anything, as well.