Slashdot Mirror
School District Sued By ACLU Over Student's Free Speech Rights
An anonymous reader writes "The ACLU is suing Minnewaska Area Schools and Pope County, according to this article in the StarTribune. At issue: school administrators and a sheriff's deputy forced a girl to hand over login information to her Facebook and email accounts, after she posted on Facebook that she 'hated' a school hall monitor who had been 'mean' to her, and cursed in a separate Facebook comment because someone reported her. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and an order that would restrain school officials from attempts to regulate or discipline students based on speech made outside of school hours and off school property."
In this regard (free speech being regulated by schools, universities, employers, etc) the US is starting to look a lot like former Eastern Germany. I mean, like in this movie http://imdb.to/2fC1aE I find it really hard to understand how the US justifies this spying on each other's thoughts.
This is disturbing not necessarily because of the password coercion, but because of the entire premise. What are the school administrators, the parents, and the entire adult community *thinking* when they make such a big friggin deal about "I hate you" comments that are clearly just juvenile emoting? Why are they getting involved in such petty hall locker politics to begin with?
Did they never mature past a high school emotional age?
Were they itching to make an example of someone?
Do they have some policy or quota that they need to demonstrate compliance with?
In other words, it's just like when my wife flips out after I leave dirty socks on the floor. The socks aren't the real problem; something else is. She's been bottling it up, and the socks were just the trigger for some other pent up stress... it may or may not be something I did, but it certainly means there's something I need to fix. In the same sense, something else is going on in Minnewaska... something else that needs fixing. And it's not middle school drama.
I can see the fnords!
Sometimes the ACLU's actions make me roll my eyes, but on this one, they're right.
Why is it that so many posts praising the ACLU in any way contain this kind of ritual disclaimer? Can you give actual examples of some of the eye-roll-inspiring things the ACLU has done, or is it just "I've heard they're a liberal organization, and liberals are icky"?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Same up here in Canada. My High School (grades 8-12, ~250 students) was mostly farm kids. The teachers were mostly unqualified or should at the least never have been allowed to teach. The overwhelming pressure from the students was such that if you were too smart you would often find yourself being beaten up. Some sample moments from my school:
* The math teacher teaching grade 12 math was living with one of his female students. She got straight A's of course.
* The grade 9 English teacher I had, had to the best of my knowledge no teaching credentials. He had been hired before they were required. He taught English and the Agriculture courses (we had a barn attached to the school). He liked to separate his class into 2 halves - those he liked (farmer's kids) and those he didn't (anyone unusual, males with long hair (this was the 70's). The first group was referred to as the Wolves (or something like that) the second as the Rabbits (or something like that). Essays written by Rabbits got written up on the board so we could review them word by word in class.
* Grade 10 English teacher. She was nice but was qualified to teach Phys Ed and Biology. They hired here but then had her teach English. I ended up teaching most of the grammar lessons because she didn't understand it at all.
* Chem teacher 10-12. He was an alcoholic type, and we students periodically met him in the local bar after class. He delivered all his lectures via overhead projector and never looked at students most of the time.
* Our guidance counselor was a bitter ex-nun. She hated the students I suspect. I know she told me that I was "too stupid to go to university, you should go learn welding or something".
* We had a music teacher who lived near the school. He would regularly hold all-night parties featuring mostly free booze and weed. He invited a lot of the band students to these parties, particularly the young females.
Nothing was ever done about these situations sadly.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
You'll want to take this up with the 1st and 4th amendment of the constitution.
The school doesn't have the authority and it never will. The ACLU isn't being foolhardy. They're entirely right here. If the school suspected something dangerous, they should have alerted the authorities and the parents with the information they had and been done with it. They had no rights to threaten a little girl into handing over her login details for things she has done off school property.
Every example you gave have procedures to deal with them. Defamation? That is a civil matter. Stalking, violence? That is a job for the police.
Schools should never have the right to discipline a child for something said off school property. That's why this whole cyber-bullying thing is such a joke. Parents expect the schools to be able to do something, but they can't do anything. Nor should they be able to. If it doesn't happen on school property, there is no reason for the school to be involved.
At least in the USA police are typically not allowed to interview minors without at least notifying the parents, so it wouldn't surprise me if either department policy or state law was broken during these proceedings. However, it's hard-to-impossible to get abusive officers (or departments) disciplined for anything unless there is video and a willing district attorney (something of a rarity in itself), so it probably doesn't matter much if the former is the case.