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Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Courts - Still more on: "Florida high school student files complaint after suspension for creating Facebook page critical of teacher"
Updating this Dec. 11, 2008 ILB entry, MaryClaire Dale reports today in the Washington Post, under the headline "ACLU defends girl's lewd MySpace principal parody." Some quotes:
PHILADELPHIA -- A federal appeals court must decide whether a Pennsylvania middle school can suspend a student who, at home on her own time, created a lewd MySpace page about her principal.The Web page, which boasted a fake name but an actual photo of the principal, was purported to have been posted by a 40-year-old Alabama school principal who described himself, through a string of sexual vulgarities, as a pedophile and sex addict. The Internet address included the phrase "kids rock my bed."
The case, argued in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday, raises broad issues about the limits of school discipline for off-campus behavior that affects the atmosphere at school. A rash of similar cases have surfaced across the country, with mixed rulings, but none has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
The American Civil Liberties Union argues that students enjoy free-speech rights off-campus that protect such parodies, however vulgar.
"Parents give up some control at the schoolhouse gate," Mary Catherine Roper, an ACLU lawyer in Pennsylvania, told the appeals court judges. "When the students walk back out, they again are under control of their parents."
However, a lawyer for the Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County said the student's actions caused a disturbance that reverberated inside school and harmed the principal. Students were buzzing about the site for several days, and school administrators quickly became aware of it. * * *
[Judge D. Michael Fisher] nonetheless cautioned Blue Mountain about the price it might pay for winning the case.
"Do we want our school districts to become Internet police?" Fisher asked.
The Supreme Court has said that students enjoy some free-speech rights, such as the right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, while rejecting the right to lace a school speech with sexual innuendo.
In 2007, the high court upheld sanctions against a student from Alaska who carried a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" sign at an off-campus school outing, reasoning that the student was promoting illegal drugs.
In a case nearly identical to the Blue Mountain case, a different 3rd Circuit panel is weighing a MySpace parody of a western Pennsylvania school principal that was argued in December. And in New York, the 2nd Circuit has upheld school discipline in two off-campus Internet speech cases after finding the disruption at the schools was "foreseeable."
Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 2, 2009 05:00 PM
Posted to Courts in general