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Missouri High School Principal Resigns After Posing As Student On Facebook
longacre writes "Suzy Harriston wanted to be friends on Facebook. The profile said she was from Clayton [Missouri] and had more than 300 friends, many of them from Clayton High School. No one seemed to question who Harriston was. That is, until the night of April 5, when a 2011 grad and former Clayton quarterback posted a public accusation. '"Whoever is friends with Suzy Harriston on Facebook needs to drop them. It is the Clayton Principal," wrote Chase Haslett.' Suzy Harriston quickly disappeared from Facebook, and Louise Losos, the principal, subsequently took a leave of absence, and then resigned."
I know for a fact that stuff like this happened in my old high school in Missouri, but we didn't ever 100% prove it. Whenever the principal would find something that someone had posted on Facebook during school and punish them during the same day, it was pretty obvious.
She put the "Pal" i n principal!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Slow news day eh timothy?
neat.
...so calm down.
He just wanted to know whats in, and whats out. Who's having sex and who's not. Who's going out on Friday nights and who's staying in. A principal that truly cares for his pupils. Either that, or he wanted in on those sexy beach pictures the cheer leading captain took with all her friends this summer.
There's hardly any news for nerds anymore.
I can't prove it, but students in my HS seemed to be punished almost *immediately* from certain FB postings, even postings made during school hours from cell phones, etc.
Either they had someone monitoring FB full time (doubtful), or there was a "trap" account disguised as a student that people friended by default believing the account was associated with a student at the school.
I would say this one is still an okay story to put on Slashdot compared to some of the other constantly anti-Apple stories ( really, have we all come to a consensus Apple is evil and others are not? and I am not an Apple fan either ) and the anti-TSA stuff (how many stories do we need of that? We all are in agreement about that one for sure). Why is this particular story interesting? IMHO , how bad is faking your identity online ? I mean did she solicit students for sex ? or was it just to know the current vibe among? Did she just wanna be a cool principal by knowing what goes on among her students ? I briefly read the above article about the whole PE teacher thing. I dont know. Has no one used a fake name in real life ever? Does Facebook have a policy that you cannot lie about your age to underage kids ? I think it raises some interesting questions about online identities. I mean what if she was friends with some kid in the school and she got that kid to give her the username/password of their fb account (hypothetically speaking) and just looked at all her friends profiles and walls etc. Wouldn't that be similar to this?
on baby...don't is the group that ASSOCIATION OF in a head spinning SuDden and like I should be
POOP
When I was on Facebook, I didn't friend anyone unless I actually *knew* the person. If you friend someone on Facebook just because they friended you and you want a really big number of friends, well... the joke is probably on you.
Did they get fired for that?
I'm not sure who or what the persons are who do this, but as someone with around 300 Facebook friends, I've received at least 5 friend requests from dummy profiles (fake name, fake profile pic, awfully "sterile" personal info) with an oddly high number of mutual friends. I doubt it was any of our teachers as they use their real profiles and friended us if they wished to, including our principal. Could it be some sort of a bot for harvesting personal information that would otherwise be inaccessible to non-friends, or just a stalker from within my/my friends' social circle who's trying to remain anonyous?
If "Suzy Harriston" was indeed a fake profile created by Losos, then she violated a recent Missouri law which went into effect this year which bans teachers from friending students. What's worse, the school district seems to be covering up any attempt to find out if that's the reason why she resigned.
Another reason to "friend" only folks I know in IRL....
if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.
She might just have garnered herself a lucrative position in the Department of Homeland Security. Leaving the public school system, an industry under fire & in decline, for the one true growth industry in the USA -- the Police State Complex, might be a great career move.
Can't even make friends on Facebook like her.
That is a low level of sad.
RIP in peace.
substitute she in those sentences
Especially the sentence from the former quarterback. "Whoever is friends with Suzy Harriston on Facebook needs to drop them."
It grates badly enough on old ears to hear "they" and "them" be used for singular, but now it's even used when the gender is known?
Obviously this is a bad thing but I don't understand how kids reason. Seriously, when someone tries to add me on Facebook and I don't know them then I ignore them. Being that the Facebook person was not even real she should not have had any friends. I guess if you don't add every random person you find on Facebook then you might miss out on random party invites to places you aren't really wanted.
Since we are talking about FB for no reason, shouldn't more appropriate stories come up, like the fact that it's going IPO soon?
It's really amazing that the inflation is so gigantic now, that it destroyed so many businesses and killed off real savings, that the investors are flocking just to anything that has some buzz around it. Sure, sure, a half a billion to a billion accounts are there, it's a sea of information and contacts and eyeballs, it's really amazing that there are so many people using the same platform, but after everything it is just another site, it's not like there weren't sites like this before and nobody really prevents more sites like this from appearing in the near future. Are people really intimately tied to their FB accounts? I don't know, I am just asking. To me it looks like a huge inflation driven bubble and a reflection of our time of lack of genuine investment opportunities due to lack of real savings and freedoms, but maybe I am completely wrong on this, I just don't know.
Isn't that a more interesting story than somebody pretending to be somebody else?
You can't handle the truth.
...to accept a friend request from someone they've never heard of? Is this why all the kids have 600 FB friends despite their actually pretty limited social circles?
Unless she was using it for something nefarious, this is actually a good idea. No on is forcing the kids to friend her on facebook; hell, it took a while for anyone in the school to even realize that Suzy didn't exist!
Again, it depends on what they are looking for, are they using it to punish kids for what they do at home?, then maybe not. Is she being a sexual miscreant, then maybe not.
Another possibility is that she's using it to see how the students are doing, if any of them need extra help or counseling, if one of them is going to go off the deep end.
It could be abused, but it could also really help. Of course, they don't talk about what she used it for.
When I read this, it struck me that - while it's OK for US gov't employees (eg, soldiers) to pre-emptively attack & kill people, AFAIK, this article doesn't suggest any inappropriate behavior (eg, "grooming" [for unlawful sex], etc.)
It may be so that teachers & principals are forbidden from befriending students, and there is reason for this ban (eg, favoratism could - in some cases - lead to changes of grades or reduced "consequences" for rule breaking on the part of students).
But we wonder if there could have been any -humane- reasons for this principal's action; eg, could there have been any indications of abuse of the students by 3rd parties? Could the principal been watching for any indications of grooming, etc.?
Could she have wanted her -genuine- advice to be "better received" than it might be "from a prinicipal"? (Friends sometimes have -greater- influence on a young person than parents or school staff.) Of course, if she's been advising students to run amock, she was wrong.
"War-making deemed good; movie at 11" :-)
"Friendship deemed evil; movie at 11" :-)
Hi, posting AC 'cuz im lazy.
I went to school with this woman, her older sister was in my class and IIRC they both went to Harvard. My point in saying that is that I'd always had the impression that these were smart ladies. Certainly older sister is, I believe she is a scientist of some sort now. I really don't keep up with people from high school.
We went to a public high school in a nice part of St. Louis, Louise went back after college and taught there for 8 years apparently.
If you google her name you will see her LinkedIn page pop up. You can see she has an extensive background getting her degrees, including a Ph.D.
She is plenty smart to know better than to spy on the students. If she just had to know what was going on in her school, she should have actually taken the time to get to know people and talk to them. To me this is only common sense.
No telling what happened to that in her 25 years of education/work since she left high school. People change, but I dont see where it is right to spy on kids on Facebook. As a matter of fact, I find it rather nosy and a bit creepy.
Clayton, Mo. is a wealthy city just immediately west of the city of St. Louis itself, so they will do everything to cover this one up and pretend it never happened.
Singular they has rapidly taken over to the point where it's now even used for persons where there is a presumed gender. While I may be fighting a losing battle, by god does it need fighting.
Why do you feel it needs fighting? I really don't think it's critically important to communicate gender with every use of a pronoun. We don't have separate pronouns for different races, young vs. old, short vs. tall, fat vs. skinny, smart vs. stupid, obstinate grammar nazi vs. speaker of contemporary english, etc., so what makes the detail of gender so important that it alone must be embedded in the pronoun? I really can't see a purpose for automatically referencing gender every time you refer to a person other than to reinforce sexism.
We don't have a "proper" gender-neutral singular pronoun, so we use "they" and "them" instead. It doesn't matter if this behavior has precedent dating back to the 1300s or if it started last week. What matters is that it's currently widespread and unambiguously understood by most (if not all) modern english speakers. The dictionary should be descriptive, not prescriptive. You are witnessing the evolution of language in action! Don't fight it, be fascinated and pleased!
Knowledge != Intelligence
That's "film at 11" in the US, "pictures at 11" in Commonwealth countries, knob-head.
Who actually friends people they havent spoken to or even *seen*?
I dont even add people I have met and known for a couple of months, until Ive had a chance to speak with them on a semi regular basis first and work out if they are interested in my life, or if I am even interested in theirs.
Far too much trust on the Interwebz, no wonder so many people get screwed by scammers.
you'd think, "I must actually know this person, and just don't realize it."
This tends to be more true after graduation. Lots of people change their last name upon being married. Some people even change their first name for various reasons.
That said, I tend to be wary of adding people I'm unsure of due to creepy stalker-ex's, so I usually do a bit of research first. FB doesn't make it easy as somebody can request to friend you without supplying any details of their own (perhaps that's changed now but I doubt it). The system should work so that anyone who makes a friend request should automatically share the same pages as they do to the already-friended
4. Registration and Account Security
Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
1. You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
Obviously the "no false personal information" is not widely followed anyhow... but it is a TOS violation.
The district has now paid out a $140k settlement to the principal to keep her from suing the district. And they had to agree to give her positive references.
I wonder how the quarterback got his information... and if it was really correct. It is no secret that the quarterback wanted her fired after she fired the football coach.