At a guess, grab as much copyright as they could get away with so that they’d be legally protected no matter what they or their successors did with the material, good or bad, and ignore the potential negative consequences of demanding the kids submitting their work surrender their creative rights. When there’s a finite shield against legal liability, you can bet their bottom dollar that the corporation with a law firm on retainer is going to hog as much of it as they can irrespective of the cost to anyone else. Scholastic’s lawyers might even have decided on the overkill strategy by default.
We have facts. What we don’t have are legal expertise with which to evaluate those facts. Luckily, we’re not a court of law; we’re a bunch of snarky malcontents on the promenade deck of the good ship Boing Boing.
