Shran wrote:
Okay, this simply boggles my mind. Clearly the 3rd Circuit got it right. But let's take Sotomayor's and Fisher's arguments to, what I assume is, their logical conclusions.
It seems that Sotomayor is arguing that schools have the right to regulate anything that might interfere in their functioning. Well, the failure of a school levy to pass at the ballot box would certainly interfere negatively in a school's functioning, wouldn't it? So, should the school have the right to tell the voters they don't have the right to deny them funding since it would interfere in their functioning? Also, suppose a lot of parents decided to withdraw their children from a public school and enroll them in private schools. The sudden absence of a large sement of the student body would clearly interfere with the public school's functioning. Should the school have the right to tell the parents they MUST send their kids to that particular school?
Fisher seems to be arguing that anything that interferes with the school's learning environment is fair game for the school to regulate. This reminds me of a picture/joke that circulated the internet a while back. A teacher sent a letter to a student's parents telling them to make their child understand that he shouldn't question the curriculum. Why? The teacher taught the class that a kilometer was longer than a mile. The student, in turn, disrupted the class by insisting that the teacher was wrong. The letter ended with "your son was right, but would be better off simply accepting my teachings without resistance." Clearly, a student who does something like this is disrupting the learning environment, though I would argue he is disrupting it positively. Should the school be allowed to suspend the student for simply questioning the teacher?
Sorry if that was a little long, but WOW, what are these people thinking?
It seems that Sotomayor is arguing that schools have the right to regulate anything that might interfere in their functioning. Well, the failure of a school levy to pass at the ballot box would certainly interfere negatively in a school's functioning, wouldn't it? So, should the school have the right to tell the voters they don't have the right to deny them funding since it would interfere in their functioning? Also, suppose a lot of parents decided to withdraw their children from a public school and enroll them in private schools. The sudden absence of a large sement of the student body would clearly interfere with the public school's functioning. Should the school have the right to tell the parents they MUST send their kids to that particular school?
Fisher seems to be arguing that anything that interferes with the school's learning environment is fair game for the school to regulate. This reminds me of a picture/joke that circulated the internet a while back. A teacher sent a letter to a student's parents telling them to make their child understand that he shouldn't question the curriculum. Why? The teacher taught the class that a kilometer was longer than a mile. The student, in turn, disrupted the class by insisting that the teacher was wrong. The letter ended with "your son was right, but would be better off simply accepting my teachings without resistance." Clearly, a student who does something like this is disrupting the learning environment, though I would argue he is disrupting it positively. Should the school be allowed to suspend the student for simply questioning the teacher?
Sorry if that was a little long, but WOW, what are these people thinking?
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[COLUMN] Off-campus online speech deserves protection
The confusion concerns whether in the Internet age government schools should be permitted to discipline pupils for online speech when it occurs away from the school.
Judges are so confused that two separate panels of the 3rd U.S .Circuit Court of Appeals reached two very different conclusions in two separate cases Feb. 4.
In 2005, while a high school senior in the Hermitage School District in western Pennsylvania, 17-year-old Justin Layshock created a fake Facebook profile parodying the high school principal. He was suspended for 10 days and, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the district.
In 2007, a federal judge sided with Layshock and ruled that school districts cannot discipline pupils for off-campus speech.
School officials argued they have the right to regulate online off-campus speech because the speech can be accessed at the school.
U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry rejected that argument: "The mere fact that the Internet may be accessed at school does not authorize school officials to become censors of the World Wide Web."
The 3rd Circuit rightly agreed with McVerry.
However, in the second case, a different panel of judges thought differently.
The court sided with the lower court in upholding a 14-year-old pupil's 10-day suspension from Blue Mountain Middle School.
The Schuylkill County eighth-grader posted sexually explicit material along with her principal's photograph on a fake MySpace page. She was suspended in March 2007.
The Web page, which used a fake name but an actual photo of the principal, was purported to have been posted by an Alabama principal who described himself as a pedophile and sex addict. The page included the phrase "kids rock my bed."
The rulings on such cases in the district and circuit courts have been contradictory, leaving school administrators confused on how to handle such issues. The Supreme Court has yet to take on the issue, but clearly, it is time for the high court to step in.
At least one Supreme Court justice has heard a similar case.
In 2008, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor was on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, she signed onto the decision in Doninger v. Niehoff ruling that schools had the authority to regulate off-campus online speech because that speech can disrupt the functioning of the school.
That seems to be the misguided logic used by the judges in the Blue Mountain case in which Judge Michael Fisher wrote in a footnote: "Electronic communication allows students to cause a substantial disruption to a school's learning environment even without being physically present. We decline to say that simply because the disruption to the learning environment originates from a computer located off campus, the school should be left powerless to discipline the student."
However, as McVerry wrote in his 2007 opinion, "The school's right to maintain an environment conducive to learning does not trump [a pupil's] First Amendment right to freedom of expression. ... Public schools are vital institutions, but their reach is not unlimited."
While separation of school and state would make this question moot, that is not likely to happen anytime soon.
Until then, courts need to protect the free speech of pupils. After all, as the Supreme Court ruled 40 years ago, students do not give up their free speech at the schoolhouse gates. School officials should not be permitted to reach into a family's home and police the Internet. If the speech is truly troublesome, there are alternatives.
"When students misbehave off campus, there are ample remedies in the real-world legal system," Frank LoMonte told ABA Journal a few months ago. He is the executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va. "If the speech is threatening, there are police for that. If it's libelous, there are courts for that. And if it's short of both of those things, there are phone calls to parents."
While children do not have complete freedom before reaching the age of majority, there is no compelling reason for the state to curb their freedom of speech outside the schoolhouse.
tags: Free, Speech
category | Column
author | Lucente