When I was in HS, I did Bot Ball. Our robot was powered by a HandyBoard, which definitely looks like a bomb: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HandyBoard_GJP.jpg. Remember going through the airport with it on the way to finals, joking around about how it looked like a bomb. Didn't get in any trouble despite being brown. And it wasn't just us--thousands of kids did school projects with the HandyBoard over the years. It was very popular.

I'm tempted to believe that people are just dumber than they were when I was a kid, but the truth is that this sort of thing is a freak accident. A hundred kids bring something like this into school and it's virtually guaranteed that one will eventually hit school administrators that are low on the bell curve.

Also, I'm seeing a lot of "Texas" in comments to this story. It's really unfair. I'm here in the DC metro surrounded by highly educated latte liberals, and they're some of the most paranoid parents in the country. Don't think for a second this wouldn't happen in, e.g., Silver Spring (where those parents got CPS called on them for letting their kids walk home from school).