A growing number of school officials in the Indianapolis area are trying to punish students for Internet commentary they deem inappropriate — including postings on home computers — drawing outrage from teens and free-speech advocates. One student has been expelled at one school, another suspended. One school district has warned students they are legally responsible for postings; another will vote on a similar policy this month.
Once upon a time, when old folks like me were still in school, what happened outside of school hours was our own business. School officials not only didn’t want to know, there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it even if they did know. Those days are long gone, with the Supreme Court ruling that students essentially have no rights when at school. Adminstrators can now subject students to everything short of on-campus cavity searches with no recourse open to students or parents. With uniforms, drug tests, locker searchs, and other invasions of privacy limited only by the imagination of school administrators, students can be and are treated like chattel, presumed guilty until proven innocent and with fewer rights than your average death-row inmate.
The latest example of school administrators cum control freaks is by far the most offensive example of the lengths some adults will go in their effort to treat children like second-class citizens .
“Kids look at the Internet as today’s restroom wall,” said Steve Dillon, director of student services for Carmel Clay Schools. “They need to learn that some things are not acceptable anywhere.”
And it’s the job of school administrators to police students anywhere and everywhere? Shouldn’t there be a limit to what schools are allowed to do to children? Or is their power over our children really all-encompassing?
Carmel High School used its harassment and bullying policy to expel a student Dillon said posted sexually explicit comments about a teacher on MySpace. A second Carmel student was suspended for 10 days and given community service for posting racially offensive comments about a teacher on the site, he said.
I would agree that offensive comments about teachers or administrators should not be encouraged or made light of, but isn’t this really a free speech issue? And, yes, free speech sometimes IS offensive speech. Should schools have the right and the power to censure or punish students for exercising free speech in places that have no connection to those schools?
While educators worry that postings on Web sites such as MySpace can disrupt learning, students see controlling what they post outside school as a threat to their right of free speech.
Civil rights advocates are on their side, worrying that the new policies extend government’s reach too far into the personal lives of students.
“It’s chilling and gives the effect that people don’t know what they can and cannot say,” said Henry Karlson, a professor at Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis. “How disruptive does it have to be for the school to be able to control it?”
And what’s the message being sent to our children? That they have no rights as individuals? That being students means they will be regarded and treated as chattel, and that the school can do anything at any time to control and/or proscribe whatever behavior they deem as threatening, offensive, or inappropriate?
“The school system has no right to sit there and tell us what we can and cannot do at home,” said 17-year-old Kayla Wiggington, a junior at Clark-Pleasant’s Whiteland Community High School who uses MySpace to keep in touch with friends. “They can control what we do at school, but when it gets home, the only people who can tell us what to do is our parents, not the school.”
And yet schools seem to be increasing their reach into every aspect of their student’s lives. Why? Because we let them. Until parents stand up and demand that schools stop intruding upon the lives of their children outside school hours and school activities, the problem will only grow worse…and we will have only ourselves to blame.
