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.

Honor Student Wrongly Punished For Bomb Threat

CBS, April 4 2007

A teenager in Westmoreland County who spent 12 days in a juvenile detention facility when he was wrongly accused of making a bomb threat says he doesn't want to go back to the school and he wants an apology from administrators.

Police arrested Hempfield Area High School sophomore Cody Webb, 15, last month after school administrators claimed he called in the threat 3:17am on March 12th.

But officials now concede that the call didn't come from Webb and the misunderstanding stemmed from Daylight Saving Time.

Webb, an honor student who never even had a detention, admits that he called the school's hotline that morning – an hour earlier.

The district, however, never changes its clocks – and insisted that Webb made the threat.

After his attorney finally convinced the school what really happened, Webb was finally released and all charges were dropped.

Now the school wants Webb to come back to class, but the teen says he was humiliated by the principal and doesn't want to return to the district.

He and his family are considering their next course of action.

The school's conclusion must have seemed accurate; a time stamp and a bomb threat. But would it have killed them to actually listen to the Honor student's explanation and do some investigation first? They locked the teen up in prison for twelve days before his attorney could talk some sense into them. Given the student's track record, the school should have given him the benefit of the doubt and looked into his claims instead of throwing the book at him and ending up with this mess.
Schools have historically defended their positions with the legal notion of In loco parentis, that is, that the school is taking the place of the parent while the child is in their custody and therefore the school has absolute legal right to decide how to treat its students. School officials are granted the autonomy of a governmental institution and have absolute control over their students; potential for abuse is rife.
Perhaps there should exist a resource for the students to keep the school's authority in check, and defend the students against unreasonable and (anywhere else) illegal violations of civil rights. I have had a handful of amazing and subversive teachers that could be counted on to stand up for their students, who began with the presumption of innocence and had enough common sense to plead a student's case for them. Currently such defense only seems to fall to the family attorney after the fact.
Even kids who have taken Honors-level Civics classes are too inexperienced and too naive to present a credible case, and in any case, they have already been accused, condemned and punished before any response can be made. An inordinate amount of control one institution has over its subjects is always subject to abuse.

Thankfully, the legal system still works in the Real World and these victims can be compensated. But their rights never should have been violated to begin with, and not every family can afford to make the commitment Cody Webb's parents made for their son.