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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."
I mean, what in the world are the school administrators thinking? That parents are not going to care if they force their daughter to give them their log in information to their personal accounts?
Everyone that thought it was a good idea to try and extract passwords from the girl should be fired and permanently banned from taking any tax payer money, for the rest of their lives. The people that hired them, should be fired and banned for 3 years. I bet, in a very short order, we could put an end to this foolishness.
I hate Anonymous Cowards. Also, the fucking mods are mean to me.
Tee hee.
Sometimes the ACLU's actions make me roll my eyes, but on this one, they're right. Seems to me the school's personnel took their petty authority way too far. Off school property, on a website not controlled by the school. GET 'EM, ACLU! Give 'em HELL!
Whenever I hear Americans make that claim, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
I had school teachers who thought it was their job to teach the kids how to stand up for themselves and how to stand up to authority. Including theirs.
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!
Welcome to the New American Nanny State.
Right now, schools are under heavy pressure to reduce "bullying". The politicians and money groups have seized on an issue that is easy to win over the hearts of American voters and donors. That's why "bullying" is such a hot issue right now and gets tons of media coverage.
Kids talking about sex, something mentioned in the article as being another reason why the police and school went after this student, is another always hot issue especially with American "conservatives". We must avoid talking to children or exposing them to sex at all costs.
So we have a school where a kid is accused of bullying, and also talking about sex, on Facebook. The school knows if it does nothing they'll get blasted by moms, and the media, about how they failed to protect other children from bullies and perverts. They let a student make hate speech and promote sex talk amongst pre-teens or whatever. But if the school acts then they'll get blasted by people who think that the schools should mind their own business and let the parents handle things. And we know how well parents handle things in modern America.
Instead of finding a middle ground, the school feels the pressure from all sides and.....calls the cops. Huge overreaction in hindsight of course but they must have felt at the time that it was warranted.
But seriously? A kid can't say that they hate their teacher anymore? A kid can't talk about sex with another kid? When I was in school it didn't matter if a kid said he hated a hall monitor or a teacher. Most of the teachers had been around long enough to recognize which kids disliked them. And most of my teachers could tell which boys and girls had started puberty earlier than others because we behaved much differently around the opposite sex. Times have changed.
The school should have just called the student's mother or father and said "some kid tattled on your kid, it's not a big deal, but you should monitor your kid's facebook and just check to see if they are doing anything that is inappropriate". No cops. No teachers. No detention even. Let the parents do their jobs.
Someday we'll end up with this. Keep in mind shit like this has happened before:
A few years after the WW-II a young teenage girl called Erika Riemann defaced the moustache on picture of Stalin at school in then soviet occupied Germany. She got ratted out and then they sent her to Sachsenhausen, a nazi concentration camp the soviets had reactivated. She spent 8 years there where she was continously brutally raped by the guards who knocked her front teeth out in one episode.
It's not ideal. The administration shouldn't ask in the first place, but it's a means you can employ to protect your privacy.
*shrugs*
Under the current thinking, a child can be charged as an adult if a crime is considered heinous enough, but denied its rights up until its 18th birthday. In short, if you're a kid, the State isn't really sure you have any rights. One might argue that it would have been particularly noble of an adult to have stepped in, and prevented this abuse, but nobility / honour is kind of out of fashion. Bowing to your leaders and their demands (thinking is hard), dogmatically agreeing with everything they say (spine of a jelly-fish), and fighting over their scraps is the current in-thing (if we are good, we might be able to ask for a small favor later on).
For the record, we also send off kids to die before they're old enough to drink, have a permanent caste system, and we attack / infiltrate groups of people who have never spoken an ill word nor lifted a finger against us. We put the vile in evil.
I am John Hurt.
Rational adults know that just because a kid says something bad about a teacher doesn't mean the student's out to do the teacher harm. So why do most school policies nowadays attribute any attitude short of sunshine and happy unicorns to be evidence of mental problems worthy of nuke-it-from-orbit 'solutions'? The most obvious conclusion is that it's the school trying to save face when the student gets too close to the truth for their comfort, so they play out the zomg-columbine excuse. The fact is, the teachers that get the majority of the jeers from students often deserve it, and since most often the student complaints get buried under piles of bureaucratic and jingoistic fallacy (arg from authority usually) whether they're legitimate or not, students resort to other means of expression. In many ways, this is the equivalent of employers using the law (and contracts) to dictate more and more of what employees may do outside of work..
I swear, it's like every institution in this country is looking to get their hands on as much of everyone's freedom as possible, with the schools becoming the front lines for indoctrination. Too bad. I guess expression is only to be tolerated when authority has the mouthpiece most of the time and gets to set the politically correct boundaries for everyone else. It's truly a shame how hard and how fast liberty has fallen in this country. The stipulations for when and where we may exercise our rights have become more and more byzantine and the fine print is getting ever more fine as the power hungry chip away..
You know, police officers used to be looked up to back in the day. Now they are just hired thugs to be feared. How big of a man do you have to be to intimidate and coerce a little girl? What a piece of shit
Too many parents think that their child is a special snowflake. They must protect their snowflake from having any negative experiences, like having another kid dislike them. Their special snowflake is not supposed to grow up, and not excepted to actually be able to cope with such traumatic thins as having some other kid actually disliking them.
Of course, it goes without saying that no one else's kid is as special a snowflake as your own - it's absolutely fine to traumatize other kids, in order to protect your own.
The next generation of Americans will have a huge challenge to overcome their upbringing...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Accessing computer systems with stolen passwords is a crime.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Nowhere in the article was there a complete quote; there was only single words. There have been a number of posts here that assume all she said was "I hate you". It is not clear from article that those were the word she used. maybe they were stronger like "I hate him because he was mean to me and he should have the crap beaten out of him". This is yet another article with enough detail to get the "free speech" brigade up in arms without giving enough information to make a logical conclusion about the issue.
There are many schools that "regulate and monitor" speech off school property. Those kids who use bullying speech off school grounds are the same ones who use physical bullying on campus. A target can avoid bullying off campus but when they have to be in the same hallways, change rooms and classrooms as their bullies it becomes impossible. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to threaten or bully. Would you rather the school handle it or the youth court system? Perhaps if the school did it a bully will learn before he/she get a juvenile record. The juvenile court system is burdened enough as it is without having to deal with issues that could be handled in a much simpler way.
To those who think that anti-bullying campaigns are "nanny brigade" I say you have never been bullied. Personally I got beat up by the entire soccer team I was on because a few bullies started it. Stand up for yourself does not work when it is five to one. You have never had to walk down a hall when you never know when you will be body checked into a locker, have your books slapped out of your hands, be elbowed in the head, etc. Bullies are smart they know where the teachers are and will not be seen.
While I appreciate that this situation is outright silly (on the part of the school), ACLU's action here seems a little foolhardy. If schools can't discipline kids for what they say on social media, etc., then how are they meant to respond to cyber bullying such as that has led to however many teen suicides? What about defamation of teachers/students (I'm not talking about the usual Mr. So-and-so is a poopoohead, but what about calling him a pedo or something)? What about cyber-stalking or threats of physical violence against teachers/students?
The alternative would be to deal with those issues through more judicial means, and that isn't necessarily better.
And the correct fix for this is to fire the involved parties with cause. To insure that that principle and cop never work in there respective fields again. They each knew what they were doing and exceeded there powers. Hell the principle should have been informing the kid that they did not need to talk to the officer without there parents and should not do so, they have a responsibility to act in the parents stead in there absence, that's where a lot of there powers come from in the first place.
No sir I dont like it.
They didn't just exceeded their powers. They were accessing a computer system with stolen or coerced passwords. This is a federal crime. They are just criminals.
It's a violation of the terms of services, and violation of federal law:
18 USC Â 1030 - Fraud and related activity in connection with computers.ahref=http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030rel=url2html-19895http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030>
Cops need a warrant to obtain a password. Even if the person is a child. Schools are forbidden from doing so even with a warrant.
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