Slashdot Mirror
Student Faces Expulsion for Blog Post
ThPhox writes "A student in the Plainfield School District in New Jersey is facing expulsion from the school district for a post made on his personal blog during non school hours. From the article: "A 17-year-old student who posted on his blog site that he was being bullied and threatened by the Plainfield School District will face an expulsion hearing this week, a local attorney said.""
Obviously I skipped out on the days when they taught grammar, spelling, and/or typing.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
"The First Amendment doesn't give an individual the right to scream 'Fire' in a crowded theater and say that is protected by First Amendment rights," Harper said.
Yes it most certainly does. However, that crowded theater also has the right to kick you out for any reason it deems neccessary. Screaming "Fire!" isn't a threat directed to anyone. It's simply a disrupting comment. While I don't see any reason NOT to throw someone out of a theater who screams "Fire!", it's certainly not grounds for arrest.
I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web.
See, you need to RTFA, because what you did and what's going on here aren't even remotely related.
This kid's getting expelled because some teacher thought he was threatening another Columbine. He's not, but to be frank he sucks at writing, and it's an easy mistake to make. You got expelled because you chose to facilitate the circumvention of school policy. There's a big difference. You deserved it and he doesn't.
See, it's all well and good to pretend that your cgi is somehow this facilitation of free speech, that you're an epic crusader for the rights of good, and that any attempt to quash you is a 1984-style brain censorship which threatens the deep fabric of the nation. The problem is, it's nonsense. The fact of the matter is that school isn't your time. Teenagers seem to be unable to comprehend this. When you're on the job, looking at porn will get you fired. Why? It's not because of the porn itself; nobody can punish you for something protected under the first amendment and blah blah blah. Whatever.
More importantly, you're fucking around at work. That gets you fired. You did the same thing at school, but not just personally. The better metaphor for what you did would be to distribute CDs full of porn to all your coworkers, and told them to watch it at work too. But, it's actually worse than that, because the school has custodial obligations, and you're also opening their interior network to threats like child predators and information/identity thieves.
See, when you're at school, you don't need to be on boobfuck.net . It's really that simple. You didn't have the right to alter the school's network, and you did it anyway. And you know what? You deserved the expulsion.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Frankly, this kind of thing happens all the time. High Schools are becoming less an institution of learning and more an institution of mass propaganda, control, and, dare I say it? tyranny.
Oh, get over it, you drama queen. There are sixty five thousand highschools in this country. You hear about four doing bad things and suddenly the whole system is tyrranical mind control.
The best part is that if you would read what's actually going on, you'd know that this isn't about censorship or freedom of speech at all. Slashdot has spun this horribly backwards. What's really going on is some kid who sucks at writing tried to co-opt the tragedy of Columbine to show how serious a kid's feelings of being bullied can be, and some teacher mistook him to mean that he was going to go shoot up his school.
The school is acting on a false threat. It's not censorship. It's an attempt to do the right thing based on a misunderstanding. The problem isn't the school or the school board. It's the teacher who told them this kid was making threats.
StoneCypher is Full of BS