Huh. You know, I just didn't think it would come from the schools! Well, live and learn...
Ethics Alarms has been steadfast in its position from the very first reports of schools presuming to punish students for what they post online, in their own time, in their own homes. That position is, and will forever be, that this is a gross abuse of power that must not be tolerated, much less encouraged. Every time I have written about this, there have been defenders of the practice. This story, from Minnesota, should convince them of how wrong they are.
A 12-year-old sixth grade student, identified in court documents only as R.S., first ran afoul of the Minnewaska Area Middle School’s jack-booted disciplinarians when she wrote on her Facebook “wall” that she hated a school hall monitor because she was “mean.” Someone sent the principle a screen shot of the post, and he responded by forcing the student to apologize to the hall monitor and by giving the girl detention.
Wrong. There was no school misconduct, indeed, there was no misconduct at all. If a student wants to hate a hall monitor, or a teacher, or anyone else, that is her right. Saying so to friends is also her right, and no apology is necessary. When an apology is called for, it is not within the school’s authority to demand it. Parents…remember them?
Next, R.S. took to Facebook to demand who the rat was who turned her in—a good and fair question, if you ask me. She used an expletive in the process, which, under the circumstances, also seems quite understandable, if not properly genteel. For this, she was given in-school suspension and missed a class ski trip as a result.
Incredibly wrong! How dare the school inflict this degree of punishment—or any punishment—for private communication that didn’t even relate to school personnel? I don’t know where her slug-like parents were during all this—I would have been in the principle’s office in a flash, and combat would have commenced in earnest.
The parents were finally roused from their apathy after this: the girl was pulled out of class and interrogated by school officials because the guardian of another student complained that R.S. had initiated an exchange on Facebook regarding…sex. This apparently prompted the school to bring in a deputy sheriff and a school counselor, among others, and to badger the 12-year-old into revealing her log-in and passwords for her Facebook and e-mail accounts.
The ACLU has joined a lawsuit against the school alleging violations of the child’s First and Fourth Amendment rights, but the Constitution aside, how do school officials presume to have any authority to discipline a student for off-campus speech or conduct?
I actually know the answer to that: it is a logical progression. First the excuse for punishing students for private posts on Facebook was that they were denigrating other students. This is the anti-bullying hysteria at work, in which bullying is anything a school administrator decides to call bullying, and supposedly justifies trampling on the student’s rights. Then schools decided that they could punish students for stating their personal opinions about teachers, or expressing violent fantasies about them. Next, schools decided that using vulgar language on Twitter could justify a student’s expulsion, at least if the school was Catholic and private, on the theory, I suppose, that being both justifies abusing authority.
Now we can see, with the over-reaching and cruel bullying by school authorities of a girl based on their subjective (presumptuous, intrusive, irrelevant) judgment that her personal Facebook posts are inappropriate, that this slippery slope has slipped faster than expected. I know I’ve posted this same self-quote before, but hey, I’m not this right that often—indulge me:
“I see no reason, if the extension of school authority off of school grounds is allowed to continue, why the next school won’t suspend its students for making disrespectful statements about President Obama on Facebook, or making derogatory statements about illegal immigrants, or passing along politically incorrect jokes, or disapproving of the Ground Zero Mosque, or posting cross-hairs as a graphic… or criticizing the teachers union.”
I think we’re there.
Ethics Alarms 
Indeed, we are there, Jack. Just how much of this are parents going to take before they either take the schools back from these commissars or just abandon public education altogether?
Does the state own our children? It acts like it sometimes.
That’s ridiculous and doesn’t surprise me. I recall getting in trouble for a facebook photo I took of an unidentifiable student wearing medieval battle armor because a completely unrelated parent with an axe to grind saw it on my facebook account and sent it to the director of hr. Of course, being a teacher is different than being a student, but the point remains that they regularly overstep their boundaries. Perhaps the whole thing starts with poor personal boundaries, given the despotic nature of compulsory education.
What was the objection to the photo to begin with?
Other than the fact that the school was completely out of line, why in the world would school administrators even want to take on the responsibility of disciplining students outside of the school? Administrator’s like this have much better things to be doing which actually relate directly to the educational climate. Like setting up secret proms.
Ah! The secret prom! Indeed one of the all-time ow points of miserable school administrator cruelty. I’m sorry you reminded me…I had almost purged it from my memory banks.
“…and to badger the 12-year-old into revealing her log-in and passwords for her Facebook and e-mail accounts.”
This part bothers me quite a bit. By forcing R.S. to give them these credentials under duress, they have probably (A) committed felony Computer Trespass (and maybe Identity Theft), and (B) forced her into the position of violating the terms of service of Facebook and her ISP, which means causing tangible harm if R.S. is ever dropped–rightfully–from those services.
Why don’t they force her to give up her bank account numbers, ATM PIN, and make copies of her house keys while they’re at it?!?
–Dwayne
Don’t give them any ideas, Dwayne! It certainly seems that the professional “educrats” are bound up in the notion that America’s children belong to them, first and foremost.
But don’t you know it is OK to violate privacy laws if you are the police? That is why the police can peruse the driver’s license database for fun and run background checks on their ex-spouse’s new romantic interest. Silly you! This is also why the police send loaded firearms through the U.S. mail to crime labs (Doh!).
In Indiana, the legislature just passed a bill giving home owners the legal right to resist unlawful police intrusion. I have some qualms about that law… but it illustrates how recent events have sown a mistrust between the citizens and police forces.
Well, occasionally some of the violators receive minor punishments. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/
Whose idea was public education in the first place?
The people running such places are like the people who had changed the law to prevent people like Jonathan Schoenakase from giving free rides to drunks.
I think a lot of this misses the point. The schools are places of indoctrination. They are allowed to control what you are allowed to think. All topics have an acceptable answer and an acceptable opinion. To have a differing opinion is not allowed. Imagine a child stating that they have objections to affirmative action policies in a public school government class. In the past, they couldn’t prove you expressed ‘forbidden’ opinions outside of school, but now they can. This just brings the indoctrination and brainwashing to a new level.
As for bullying. As someone who was thoroughly bullied in school, I am against it. I also know that these schools aren’t trying to stop it. They are actually encouraging it. Bullying is difficult to deal with (if you are teachers) because bullies are either:
(1) athletes
(2) children of rich and influential parents
(3) their children’s friends
(4) their children
(5) the kind of kid who is failing everything and looks forward to a suspension as days he doesn’t have to go to school
They don’t want to punish groups 1-4. Punishing group 5 does no good. Instead, they usually end up punishing the victim. This case may be such an instance. Hall monitors are often students. What if this monitor was picking on this student. She calls the monitor ‘mean’, then she gets in all kinds of trouble for it. When she fails to bow down to their authority (by asking who ratter her out), they bring in the police to break her spirit.
Did you ever wonder why so many teenagers are suicidal? It is a miracle we don’t have more school shooters.
Why do they not simply stop going to school?
It is illegal in many states for them to stop going to school until they are 16. The President wants to make it 18 nationally and many states are working on that as well.
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”
Michael I appreciate your comments on this very much, painful as they were to read. It saddened me to read of the bullying you suffered. I was reminded of a political asylum case in recent years. In the related article at the link that follows here, I read that the parents “were having trouble with rowdy classmates.” Hmmm, sounds quite a bit like there was bullying:
Makes me wonder how far the U.S. will go toward the ways of Germany (and how quickly), despite recent years of relative freedom to homeschool. No doubt, there’ll be some convenient health, safety and security excuses made for expanded government control (heckfire, the gummint has ONLY BEGUN to tap that Commerce Clause!) – sprinkled with what has now become the expected, cleverly insidious guilting about “destructive multiculturalism” or “divisiveness” (read: practices of religious faith communities, who’ll get branded as “hate groups”).
With the extraterritorial police power of U.S. public schools expanding as it appears to be, so as to assure that all indoctrinees (I mean students) heel to practicing the school-approved correctness, we can all sleep in blissful, oblivious peace, knowing that no government ever would bully anyone.
“You VILL let ze Shtate ejukate your Kindern!”
I wonder if this will result in a violent revolt. And I also wonder how schools could possibly defeat a violent revolt. Truancy officers are not exactly the U.S. Marine Corps…
Remember, Michael, that many urban school districts have their own police forces nowadays!
Actually, I find that a troubling reminder of how bad the schools have gotten. When I was in high school in the late 1960’s, it was big news on campus when a policeman came… for ANY reason! Now they have their own resident cops.
This trend, apparently, got started in the 1980’s. A newer Houston high school (named for Cesar Chavez!) was actually built with a police substation encorporated into the campus. The mentality seems to have set in among administrators that their pupils must be tightly controlled in all things. This includes the threat or application of armed force. Only two decades prior, though, this would have been unheard of.
The change in curricula and disciplinary procedures are not considered as a factor, it seems. That, combined with the terror of another Columbine, has led them to the mindset of keeping the kids in a state of lockdown that extends- now- beyond the campus itself.
They’ve created their own dilemma and cannot admit it publically. Therefore, they resort to glib phrases… and soft tyranny over their charges; all of which merely exacerbates the problem. In a very real sense, the school situation mirrors in microcosm that of the nation as a whole.
Given that the U.S. military is barely able to handle a foreign insurgency, the chances of a school district police force defeating a domestic insurgency are slim to none.
You’re missing my point, Michael. The very fact that school districts now establish armed police forces to maintain order in the schools reveals that the schools are out of control and that the educators can think of no other resort than to control their pupils by indoctrination backed by the visible threat of legalized retaliation. The flaw is in the educators’ agenda.
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”