Students fight against school’s long-arm tactics
Greenwood: Students test free speech in U.S. court
Two seniors in the Greenwood school district set up personal web sites. These sites contained “Derogatory comments and cartoons lampooning Greenwood school officials”. They were sentenced with and served 3 days of suspension each. The boys have gone to court seeking an order that will prevent school administration from punishing them for future commentary not conducted at school.
[School] officials counter that with violent incidents in schools nationwide in the recent years, the Web site con- tent created an atmosphere of fear and threat and disrupted classes in the 740-student high school. The two sides presented their arguments Wednesday to U.S. District Judge Jimm Larry Hendren in a one-day bench trial. He took the testimony under advisement and said he would issue a ruling after attorneys submitted written post-trial arguments, which are due by Jan. 17. Court pleadings said the Web sites were created on the students� home computers and were not connected with the school.
Yet another school system stretching its arms into the private lives of its students. It really doesn’t matter if derogatory comments and lampoons are constitutionally protected free speech (yes, they are). It really doesn’t matter if their web sites caused disruption at the school (apparently not, I’ll deal with that in just a bit). What matters here is that the school has absolutely no authority to discipline a student for activities taken outside of school or a school event. The kids were under the nominal supervision of their parents. It is the parents responsibility to discipline them or not.
The school did not do a very good job of prepping their witnesses in regard to the “atmosphere of fear and threat and disrupted classes”.
Math teacher Clay Brown said she felt the atmosphere of learning in her classroom was disturbed until the two students were suspended. “After I found [officials] suspended the students, I felt real secure,” she said.
Under cross-examination, many of the teachers who testified said they didn�t notice the class disruptions until after the students were suspended.
Which makes sense. The boys made comments outside of school that were critical of the school. The school suspended them for it. In my high school it would have been more than a disruption - we would have gone on strike.
It seems pretty clear to me that the school was stifling critics because they felt they had said critics under their power. I am pretty confident that the judge will find for the students - there’s just no logical way to arrive at a decision favorable to the school’s actions.
Hmmm. A government entity that thinks it knows more about what is good for those under it’s control than those under it’s control do. For some reason, this sounds like a song I have heard before.
The Greenwood school district should be congratulated for their restraint. They only suspended the students 3 days for “derogatory” statements about the authorities.
Under Stalin, in the Soviet Union, or Hitler, under the Nazi regime the perpetrators of these heinous crimes would have been tortured, and then assinated.
Imagine the nerve of any student voicing any negative opinion about their rulers !!!
Tha should have been “assassinated”
LOL
I think I like “assinated”. It appears to be what has happened to the majority of school administrators.
I don’t think this discipline is enforced against every student that makes a negative comment. It’s very doubtful that parents were crying out for this or even the majority of teachers. It sounds like a political favor under the guise of school safety.
Math teacher Clay Brown said she felt the atmosphere of learning in her classroom was disturbed until the two students were suspended. “After I found [officials] suspended the students, I felt real secure,” she said.
Time and time again, courts have ruled that students have free speech rights especially when they create their websites at home, on their own computers, and on their own time.
Unless these kids threatened to kill or injure anyone at the school, or caused a major disruption, this judge is going to rule for the kids. I hope it costs the school district beaucoup bucks too.
In my area, we had a really wild student website that was very critical of school officials, teachers, the cops in town — anyone in authority. The message board was actually obscene at times, but school officials knew they were going to lose if they tried to shut it down or discipline any of the kids for participating in it. It later died out for lack of interest.
Time and time again, courts have ruled that students have free speech rights especially when they create their websites at home, on their own computers, and on their own time.
Unless these kids threatened to kill or injure anyone at the school, or caused a major disruption, this judge is going to rule for the kids. I hope it costs the school district beaucoup bucks too.
In my area, we had a really wild student website that was very critical of school officials, teachers, the cops in town — anyone in authority. The message board was actually obscene at times, but school officials knew they were going to lose if they tried to shut it down or discipline any of the kids for participating in it. It later died out for lack of interest.
Remember when people cared about minors getting the same kind of rights as adults-free speech, for example- and the Supree Court was passing all these crazy hippie decisions like In Re Gault? That was cool.
I agree with Bettina. Sometimes the school needs to respond to threats only. I don’t like the idea of a government-like body investigating threats, but when the parents don’t step in….well, meh.
By the way, coming from a family of teachers, most teachers tend to just embarass the kids in class if they’re talking smack about them. You must have real low self-esteen to not feel “secure” because two little kids who are going to grow up are not being nice.
Based on other cases that I have read, and assuming that the facts here are complete, it sure looks as if the Greenwood officials have screwed up big time.
I think that perhaps the courts need to begin to find actual, compensatable damages for students subjected to this sort of thing. Only raising the cost to the districts that try this sort of power grab will slow it down. I note that in my area the media ignore the cost of schools legal operations, but are sensitive to taxpayer dollars being paid out because of administrative incompetence.
I’m not familiar with Re Gault, but I don’t see anything wrong with kids over 12 having adult rights. In ancient societies kids were adults by 12 and 13. We need to stop forcing people to delay their entry into adulthood to such an artifically high age. That would take care of a lot of these so-called “problem kids”.
To the person who hopes the kids win “Big Bucks”.
If you have kids in school:
When the next lawsuit hits a school, I hope it’s “your kids school” and all the optional activities they like to participate in are cancelled for lack of funding.
Sue to protect the rights - but the “My personal lottery has come in” mentality is what’s screwing the US big time. How many actitivies and even playgorund equipment is gone because of this mentality (Can’t take the risk).
If you think that it will be “just the insurance companies paying it” the premiums come out of operating funds. At a personal level look at how much all your premiums are for insurnaces you carry - subtract the “Actual Property Lost” portion and you’ll see how much this mindset is costing you and me and the fellow behind the tree.
I’m for prtecting rights but it shouldn’t become a profit motivated exercise.
Dave K, JD
Forcing schools to pay “big bucks” when their employees screw up is the only way these people learn anything. Actually, I would like to see this principal and anyone else involved sued personally. Let them pay the damages. They caused the problem.
Parents should raise holy hell when their district is forced to pay a plaintiff because of the gross stupidity of school officials.
On the other hand, Dave, I guess it comes down to a guestion of how much your civil and human rights are worth to you.
I don’t hold a violation of mine to be a small thing, and therefore believe a violation of them by government should not come cheap. That you place so little value on yours tells me that you would settle for a $1.99 or less.
AND SPEAKING OF THAT PESKY BILL OF RIGHTS
Jim Peacock at Zero Intelligence has another good (i.e., sad) example of edu-crats trampling on students’ fundamental rights. It seems that a couple of kids created websites that were critical of the administration. They did this on their own computers…
Dave seems to have leaped from my comment about ‘actual compensatable damages’ to ‘big bucks.’
I generally decry the sue at the drop of a hat mentality that is increasingly common, but in the face of this kind of idiocy I think it is necessary to pick up the tools that are available and beat these educrats over their dense skulls.
A little reading would show considerable precedent supporting the student’s positions, and almost none supporting the school’s attempt to exercise 24 hour control over student’s conduct. Since when does comments and cartoons lampooning school officials constitute causing ‘an atmosphere of fear and threat?’
Some pretty thin skins in the Greenwood school administration, it seems.
How many actitivies and even playgorund equipment is gone because of this mentality
******
How much of this money is going to the schools political activities instead of to learning anyway? Schools are a monopoly in the business of surviving, not educating. The stuff they pass off as “education” is useless to the vast majority of the students and wastes years that every citizen could have used learning something useful to them personally instead of being indoctrinated and watching the clock.
Maybe with teachers being personally accountable and a few well placed law suits, the prisons (I mean public schools), can be closed except for a few for those few children who actually require a prison-like atmosphere and nazi tactics to learn and the rest can be privatized to compete in the marketplace.
Those who believe learning is odious and can only be accomplished through brute force learned that in school. (See John Holt’s essay on Why School is Bad for Children). School should be a place students would go to even if they were not forced. You can lead a horse to water but just because he won’t drink does not mean the horse is stupid or worthless, nor does he need psychotropic drugging or a trip to the principal’s office.
For those who haven’t heard of the notion that school is no place for children or that it is a scam paid for by your tax dollars, try googling on: “John Holt” or “John Taylor Gatto” for starters. Both were award winning teachers who are now exposing the dark truth about the what education system really is. It amazes me that teachers are unaware of the hidden outcome they are unknowingly serving.
What about testing and accountability? Give kids the chance to test out of yearly compulsion. Why should a 6 year old who reads like a 5th grader sit in a class room of age peers, 6 hours per day, 5 days a week, just because she is 6? What if she would like to learn something new rather than stare at the clock and wait for the day to end. With the prospect of educational freedom till the next testing level, kids will gladly pay attention, study, and pass in exchange for even minimal control of their education, and their life.
I wish it was as minor as schools operating like a business. IMO it looks more like schools operating like a downsizing corporation and redefining law. When educators are judged based on the statistics of their school, their job becomes producing statistics. Competitive business is driven by selling a better mousetrap, a monopoly is driven by replacable cogs and politics. While a business has a chance of doing a general productive good for society, a corporation has almost no chance at all; at least long term. The corporate economy is focused on Asia and that affects our education system. Our education system is compared to the non-diverse achievements of countries who are focused on different problems.
Our downsizing corporations are moving to Asia partly due to cheap salaries, but also because Asia and especially China is consider the new horizon of revenue. Attracting Asian students is a 13 billon dollar revenue to education. Attracting Asian professionals is important to US Corporations who need the alliance to tap into the global pie. Asian education is often taught with English textbooks and is rigorously focused on improving technology, medicine the industry they needed to manage their population. Asians in the US makes less money based on their education status, but more money than any other social group based solely on income and have the highest levels of education. This boon to all American education public and private. It statistically benefits the teachers who are 75% upper class White female. These two groups are the ones that have actually experience economic improvement since 1990.
In reality I think the schools are negotiating the downsizing of the American economy. Perhaps they are lulled into believing there are big rewards for bureacrats who produce the numbers. But a good plumber still makes more than a teacher because the ability to produce a good plumber is lost to education. The funniest thing I’ve heard lately is a teacher trying to get a cheap replacement to do the job of a good plumber. By placing a higher value on education than we do on labor, education has become more like corrupt organized labor strangling the country.
The ability of the American public to provide any balance to equalitarian values is only presented in lawsuits. The only way to benefit the staggering number of students who do not benefit, that is tolerated at all by education, is suing for special ed. Special ed provides jobs for Phd’s doing education research, lawyers, mental facilities, psychologist, drug companies and mountains of aides who are usually the target of lawsuits an insatiable demands of parents who’s children are mulled by bueacracy. BTW this industry is what most US college graduates are trained for, world wide we aren’t good at math. Most schools districts comsume the local pool of lawyers so someone suing for anything but special ed would be unable to sue a district using local lawyers, due to conflict of interest. The public political postition and strength of millions of dollars in a school district cannot balance the few thousand an individual may cough up. It is an American belief it is the public’s responsibility to fight corruption, but this is largely due to not understanding that corruption is a ‘group-think’ process run by strangers.
My point wasn’t how to make them run better, it was to shut them down. Give the responsibility of education back to the parents and free those students whom the schools’ interfere in their education…which is most of them.
If parents feel they are not worthy of guiding their children’s education, this is a false belief instilled in school from educators protecting their jobs.
With better materials than the school has, including educational videos, software, internet and activities available for purchase and free from the library, school has become obsolete.
If students could pass a test once per year to excuse them from compulsion, real learning would go up and useless forced attendance would plummet along with the need for massive public funds to run the schools.
We could put two or three public teachers in each school building for those who couldn’t test out of compulsion and rent the rest of the building to private educational services, traveling exhibits, private teachers, consultants, public access studios, internet cafes, Starbucks, Fresh Choice, Kinko’s, bank kiosks, hold seminars…would it be pandemonium or fun?
The state of California pays $44 per attendance seat per day…about the same as entrance to the awesomely educational Disneyland. Disneyland is a perfect illustration of what is possible for $44/day attendance and shows the feckless handling of our tax dollars at the hands of the education establishment.
While Disneyland’s expenses are unknown, I am sure they are not minimal. They are constantly upgrading and retooling; the schools rarely retool and the curriculum looks very similar to what I had 30 years ago.
You get a whole lot more for your money at the privately competitive Disneyland for the same $44, plus everyone is paying attention. Every Disneyland employee greets you with a smile and attention to detail down to the way they point with 3 fingers to insure they do not offend, as apposed to the snarls and whining for more money you get from educators.
Traditional schooling does the absolute opposite of what it claims. It keeps people from learning by making it almost impossible for students to educate themselves which is the best way to learn; consuming all their time, evenings and weekends included, ordering them to pay attention to useless topics, making learning appear to be something to be avoided…
For learning to occur, one must be interested and pay attention in order to engage otherwise the time is lost. How many citizens spend 13 years starring at the clock when they could have been learning; what a waste.
Lets give the Educational establishment the boot along with their NEA and contract a “Michael Eisner” type. That would be cheaper and we have all seen the results.
Gene
Well, more and more people are opting out of the system — homeschooling is growing and parents are starting their own private schools. Some schools run by a group of parents let kids homeschool a couple of days a week and then take the classes that they want at the school.
There was an article in educationnews.org lately. It’s going to get harder and harder to entice young people into the teaching profession. Many young people today are entrepreneurial and don’t want to work for a top-down organization, such as a public school system — too much bureacracy and craziness.
Parents will hire the teachers they want. They will not bother with a school system that ignores their wishes, usurps their parental authority, and tries to drive a wedge between them and their children. It’s happening now.
I hope home-schooling is encouraged and becomes a greater part of societies effort in education. IMO the ideal system is patterned on parents selecting courses and evaluting the system. I find websites like RateMyTeacher.com to be very helpful in moving society in that direction also. But society has an obligation to work fairly for all of it’s citizens and prepare it’s citizens for survival. Some people are not good canidates for home-schooling because they don’t speak the language, aren’t bright enough, suffer a personal dilemma etc. It is the business of education to serve society, and adapt to social change as opposed to simply picking the winners. Of coarse there will be failure, but our intention must be fairness.
My son has worked in a number of major cities renovating historical building. When a neighborhood is remodeled millions are poured in to security, bribes, as well as legitimate business to rebuild anew. There is no accomadation made for the people who are forced out and labor is often paid below minimum wage. Zero tolerance for jaywalking tactics are used to drive people out. The largest problem facing America today is an economically polarized society and the largest immigration population since the turn of the last century. Zero tolerance tactics are simply a ‘I hate the parents’ gentrification effort that creates a slave culture.
Slave-like labor has fueled agriculture in the US, and often child labor in other countries has replaced skilled work in the US; we have become a nation that revels in catching the bad nanny instead of watching our kids. Our schools drive home the idea we are there to learn elitism, be exempt from labor and manage the servants; because we are afraid to train people for a positions that are less than professional. We should be, anything else is condemning.
Zero tolerance tactics are simply a ‘I hate the parents’ gentrification effort that creates a slave culture.
****
swp; could you clarify this? I am not sure what you mean.
On the topic of “fairness”. I have seen efforts for the “intention of fairness” only cause increased unfairness. My issue with “fairness” is it seems all kids are compulsed with no regard to weather traditional schooling would help or hurt them.
It hurt me and my siblings badly. In spite of school, we all wound up as property owners with college degrees but suffered constantly at the hands of cruel classmates and teachers.
We were abused (physically and mentally) and were forced to slave so the school system could collect a paycheck for our attendance. The thirteenth amendment states: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. I guess it doesn’t apply to kids and it is ok if some “do-gooder” has a good enough reason.
Everything school teaches we could have learned much faster without school. It sickens me to think of all the education we missed out on because we had to sit and pretend we were listening to government imposed lessons all those years.
Schools do not teach what is needed to succeed. They don’t know, and they don’t care, because they have never needed to know. They are a monopoly and collect their payments by extortion and their customers by force and threat of imprisonment.
We are in southern California in the midst of flooding and lost our electricity yesterday. The only person we knew who could give us traffic and flooding info is a boy who is flunking his classes. If we called a school, they could not have retrieved the info from the web for us; the majority wouldn’t know how. Who are these computer illiterates to tell society who deserves an “f” on their “permanent record”.
Everything useful we learned outside of school. A couple big things are; people in real life, outside of school, aren’t very mean, and actually quite friendly and decent. Also the accepted “teacher behavior” and treatment from peers I received as a child is not socially expectable in the real world - so I don’t know why the school gets away with claiming “socialization” as one of their benefits.
Can you believe the education system has the nerve to use actors in police uniforms to recite lines stating that putting your child in preschool prevents crime? How many kids under age 18 who separately wouldn’t dare commit a crime alone, but with someone they were thrown together with at school, together commit crime? I would guess 95%…maybe more.
People from schools, especially high schools, have MySpace accounts and form groups. Usually these groups consist of the bashings of a specific teacher, etc. from their school. It’s prett much the same thing, but there’s nothing the school can do about it. Haha. Freedom of speech, bitches.
I have read through the archives till now. Sometimes it makes me sad, sometimes it makes me laugh.
If I, in Estonia, get into an argument with teacher, I can almost even tell her not through ofeensive slang, but throgh delicate sarcasm that I think she’s an idiot. I can go out of classroom and fume, and even scream.
IT disrupts the learning more if the teachers pays attention, more than he/she should.
And I’m an A/B student, with good behavious and clean record. I’ve never seen my school butt into my business, or anyone elses.
I have a school-bashing website, my friend had a school-bashing website which made the teachers supposedly humorously connected to drugs and Wehrmacht. No, we didn’t get anything for that, although it would have been simple to figure out who are the creators, or at least in which class they are.
I smoked around 200 meters away from the school, by an apartment building before schoo, the school secretary only tsk-tsk-tsked me, and went off minding her business.
We don’t have any filters on websites at school no one is dumb enough to go to a porn site, knowing it installs a lot of spyware, adware, changes computer functions. I hardly ever saw anything realted to clothing you wear at school, ok, once by me, because I was the first and prior to previous two months the only ‘gothic’ person. I got reprimanded… ok scolded a bit by my teacher for wearing unappropriate for the current season clothing (a coat with no sleeves, and long arm-warmer instead of sleeves) lucily, my mothers told them to literally fuck off, and leave me and my clothes alone. Problem solved.
You on the other hand my dears, are so screwed. I pity you. Come to estonia…
I go to a school where if i make a school-bashing website, i am called out of my classes and threatened with legal action (wtf?) not to mention “slander” and more legal action as in calling in the cops, i go to a school where we are driven like slaves, welcome to boyd county kentucky
If anyone is not familiar with the work of Ayn Rand, I strongly recomend reading up. There is a quote by Mark Twain that goes “I never let schooling interfere with my education”. Niether did I. Once I figured out that the authorities did not have my best interests in mind, life suddenly made alot more sense. As early as first grade I could calculate 5 digit division and 7 digit multiplication problems in my head. As far as I was concerned, if I got everything right, why did I have to write everything out in longhand. My teachers did not agree. In fact, rather than helping me develope my above average abilities further, they did everything they could to break or unteach me of this and replace it with text book garbage. For whatever reason my school did not have a gifted program. This meant that most of my schoolwork was done in the hallway. Ofcourse my irregularity led to every psychiatric diagnosis in the book being thrown my way. God forbid a smart child could simply be given the opportunity to live up to his/her potential. The message seemed pretty clear, “We’ve got a bunch of different pegs and a bunch of round holes for those pegs. And we don’t care if the pegs are round, square, octagonal, whatever. We’re going to get all those pegs into those holes, even if we have to destroy the pegs to do it.” Thus remains the attitude of the public school system. I am convinced that, just like so many other beauracracies, the public school system performs with no regard for its results, and it is there just so it can say it is there and to say that it did something. And when failure is the continuing result, we are the ones who have failed.