Parody of principal no reason for suspension

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 12 2007

A U.S. District Court judge ruled that Hermitage School District violated a former student's First Amendment rights when it punished him for setting up a lowbrow parody profile of his principal on MySpace.com.

Judge Terrace F. McVerry ruled on Tuesday that the school district was not authorized to suspend the former high school senior, Justin Layshock, after he created the crude Internet profile of then-Hickory High School Principal Eric Trosch.

Mr. Layshock, now a 19-year-old freshman studying French at St. John's University in New York, created the profane profile of Mr. Trosch in December 2005 while using the social networking Web site MySpace.com at his grandmother's house.

"The mere fact the Internet may be accessed at school does not authorize school officials to become censors of the World Wide Web," Judge McVerry wrote. "Public schools are vital institutions, but their reach is not unlimited."

The judge stressed that schools have the right to control matters within the scope of their activities, "but they must share the supervision of children with other equally vital institutions such as families, churches, community organizations and the judicial system."

As part of his order, Judge McVerry also ruled that Mr. Layshock may seek compensatory damages in a jury trial.

Soon after the profile appeared, the school launched an investigation to find out who had created the fake profile.

After Mr. Layshock stepped forward as the creator of the profile, school administrators suspended him for 10 days, placed him in an alternative curriculum education program and barred him from attending his high school graduation.

Administrators reasoned that Mr. Layshock's lewd description of the principal had significantly disrupted proceedings at the school and caused substantial disturbance in school operations.

Mr. Trosch, now principal of Hermitage Middle School, said previously that he broke into tears when he talked to fellow administrators and teachers at the school about the profile.

In a court deposition, Mr. Trosch said his daughter, a 10th-grader at the school, first alerted him about the profile after she came home and was upset about it.

"It's degrading. It's demeaning. It's shocking," he said in the deposition. "It's shocking when a profile was forged about you."

Mr. Layshock, who is volunteering this summer at an orphanage in the small West African nation of Togo, learned of the decision yesterday when he called his mother.

"He was surprised," Cheryl Layshock said.

"The school definitely abused their power and went beyond their jurisdiction," she said.

Sara Rose, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who assisted the Layshocks in their case, said this was the fourth time that Pennsylvania school districts had unsuccessfully tried to intervene in off-campus Internet activities of their students.

"You would hope after the fourth time that school districts would learn that after students leave school they can't play parent," said Ms. Rose.

Appropriately, the courts have put the brakes on the amount of control schools can have over their students' lives outside the classroom. The ACLU has tons of horror stories where they've taken school districts to court to defend the rights and freedoms of individual students.
Organizations like these help everyone to defend their individual liberties, but we have a responsibility to use them wisely. I hope Justin will exercise better judgment in the future and keep his criticisms in good faith, and not succumb to cruelty.

School bans MySpace accounts for students

Detroit Free Press, March 23, 2007

St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School in Bloomfield Hills has taken its concern about student postings on Web sites such as MySpace one step further than most schools.
It announced a policy that flatly refuses to enroll students with accounts on MySpace.com or similar sites. Students were told Tuesday to delete their accounts on such social networking sites if they wanted to stay at the school.

St. Hugo officials could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon, but the policy is displayed on the school's Web site.

"Over the last several weeks, there has been an arrest of a teacher and a police officer, both of whom posed as children on the Internet to arrange meetings with unsuspecting children," according to the notice on the school's home page. "It is out of this concern that we have determined that the school must take a stand." The policy also says: "If a family chooses to allow their children to continue their MySpace.com account, they will not be allowed to continue as students at St. Hugo."

The school's Web site also pointed out that MySpace-style sites of some St. Hugo students violate the school's Internet policy against inappropriate comments, pictures and harassment.

"I'm perfectly OK with that," Bruce Calengor of Rochester said of the policy. His 13-year-old son, Charles, attends St. Hugo. "I don't allow him to do that sort of stuff. He has access to the Internet, but I don't allow that. ... I think there are plenty of things they can do without monkeying around on things like that."

Where on Earth does the school get the authority to expel or deny entry to students based on what they do outside of school hours and off school grounds? (My mistake, it's a Catholic school. See comments.) Potential criminal or social problems that arise from extracurricular activities are problems for the guidance counselor to deal with, and I can understand why administrators would restrict Internet usage on school time and equipment. But a blanket ban on something the school has no jurisdiction over? It's the equivalent of having a policy that states "No Students May Wear Hats" then expelling students that are found to be wearing hats, whether or not they are on school property. Isn't that utterly ridiculous?

Now this may fall under the same general category that allows employers to prohibit inter-office romances, itself of dubious legality unless the relationship has explicit repercussions within the workplace. Nonetheless, it is not the school's place to administer or discipline based on students' private lives, nor to punish those who have done nothing wrong.

MySpace's policy is to deny accounts to anyone under the age of fourteen. Parents can be held accountable for their kids' Internet access, and threats or harassment can met with the appropriate response by disciplinarians inside or outside the school. Online predators can be tracked and kids can be educated about the dangers of sharing personal information online. Popularity contests are entirely normal and meaningless. There are other, more responsible ways of dealing with the issues that caused this than suspending kids for their choosing to set up an account. If the TEACHERS and the POLICE are posing as predators to lure children, then what should be screamingly obvious is that the TEACHERS and the POLICE are the ones who need to be shaken down.

The people responsible for it don't want to care, though. It's easier for parents and teachers to institute a blanket policy than it is for them to take the time and effort to address the real, dangerous issues they fear, with the result that those issues go unaddressed and the kids have earned nothing but another tightening of the collar, all in the name of 'safety.' It's the same overstepping of authority and sweeping security reform that's caused the restrictions of personal liberties for adults, too.

Stay tuned, more on the way. But first, I gotta change my laundry over.