LOS ANGELES – It took about a week for Los Angeles students to disarm the security settings on their new iPads, leaving school officials scrambling to find solutions to the debacle.

School officials began distributing iPads to Los Angeles students this month as part of a $1 billion project designed to align lessons with national Common Core standards, and to provide the technology needed for online assessments.

Los Angeles school officials purchased about 640,000 iPads from Apple, which came preloaded with software from Pearson Education. Students at nearly four dozen campuses are slated to receive the devices.

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“One week after students started receiving their iPads, students attending at least three Los Angeles high schools had figured out how to disarm a built-in security lock that was supposed to limit what they could do with the devices,” Alan Singer wrote for the Huffington Post. “This freed them to use the iPads to surf the internet, send tweets, socialize on Facebook, stream music through Pandora, and who knows what else besides homework and school assignments.

“All students had to do to trick the system was to delete their personal profile information and then they were free to use the iPads any way they wanted to. They can download their own programs and music onto the iPads and enjoy themselves while they’re supposed to be rigorously and vigorously learning the Pearson way,” Singer wrote.

The security breach also likely means student assessments on their devices would be invalid, Singer noted.

The boondoggle convinced school officials that it would be best if they forced students to keep the iPads at school, for now. The district’s police chief thinks officials should stop distributing the iPads until the problem is fixed because “once this hits Twitter, YouTube or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices” it will be impossible “to prevent a ‘runaway train’ scenario,” Singer wrote.

We suspect it’s already too late.

Are taxpayers supposed to forgive this $1 billion boondoggle?