Felony 'hacking' charges for high school students

I saw this story on Attack of the Show (the mediocre successor to the great 'The Screensavers') this evening, and thought I should post a comment:
Apparently, some students got hold of an administrator password for their school-issued laptops and now face felony charges.

Thirteen Kutztown Area High School students are facing felony charges for tampering with district-issued laptop computers.
According to parent testimony and confirmed by an otherwise vaguely-worded letter from the Kutztown Police Department, students got hold of the system's secret administrative password and reconfigured their computers to achieve greater Internet and network access.

Do you want to know the 'secret' password? It was 50Trexler, the street address of the school. Such solid security those iBooks had. (Small dig at Apple.) Now, I might understand some punishment from the school if there was any damage done to or even a security breach of the school's server. However:

[School board Superintendent Brenda] Winkler agreed that the server, where grades and other private records are stored, was never threatened.

Third degree felonies seem a bit harsh for downloading some mp3s or a little pr0n, as expounded upon by a slashdot commenter:

Oh I know ... the teachers and administrators in this case probably feel the need to "send a message" to the student body. They think that message is "respect the law!", when the actual message is "the law doesn't respect you, so why should you respect the law?" All this kind of treatment will do is create more Kevin Mitnicks.
[Ellipsis and emphasis in original.]

I'm not sure about the Mitnick bit, but it certainly isn't far off the mark.