Marin Independent Journal – Business — These stories never end. There are plenty of ways to deal with this. Suspending kids who just look at a website is not one of them.
COSTA MESA, Calif. (AP) — A middle school student faces expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against a classmate on the popular MySpace.com Web site, and 20 of his classmates were suspended for viewing the posting, school officials said.
Police are investigating the boy’s comments about his classmate at TeWinkle Middle School as a possible hate crime, and the district is trying to expel him.
According to three parents of the suspended students, the invitation to join the boy’s MySpace group gave no indication of the alleged threat. They said the MySpace social group name’s was “I hate (girl’s name)” and included an expletive and an anti-Semitic reference.
The IJ left out the name of the school. It has the weird name of TeWinkle Middle School. Here is the school’s homepage.
Here is the more in-depth story. Well done!
this comment intrigued me:
“A lot of these kids have a really crass way of speaking to each other that parents don’t know about,” he said. “There are a lot of conversations where parents and principals would be appalled if they heard the kind of words that go down. This one just ended up on paper.”
Hmm, I wonder how the kids deveop this coarse language?
found by Breising
Wow. I actually went to that school.
What memories. Three years of …Well I didnt really like school. I had a science teacher that was intimidated by his students. Another science teacher that used the students to grade papers. A really great looking computer science teacher and access to the acoustical modem teletype connection to the district computer. Floppy disks, we didnt need no floppy disks, we had a paper tape reader ! Worked great. It was the root of my profession career.
I’ve seen some pretty horrible images on myspace.com, and it does not belong in school.
Suspending kids who just look at a website is not [a way to deal with this].
You’re absolutely right. But we must look at things from the Educrat’s perspective. The kid isn’t important, his/her education isn’t important, and the seriousness of the transgression isn’t important.
What IS important to the Educrat is avoiding any criticism. Making an intelligent (or caring) decision invites criticism, but for some reason suspending the student is always an acceptible alternative.
And yet we wonder why public education is such a mess.
for a society that always says that the kids are whats important, we have a dismal record of how we treat these *important* persons.
If they don’t get aborted to start with, then they aare treated as second class citizens. The law can do things to a child that no adult would ever allow themselves to be subjected to.
The boy who had the site should be dealt with, but the other 20 should be treated as innocent until proven guilty. Brenda is correct in what she says. Schools no longer teach, they run a traffic control center, they attempt to keep themselves free of law suits and critisism, while trying to keep the flow of money coming in and the flow of kids going out. If some students get educated along the way, well thats good to.
We allow the police or the school principle to search lockers and personal effects of students without a warrant, we put kids in detention without bond, hell, even murderers can get bond usually. We do so many things to kids it’s a small miracle that more don’t turn out to be mass killers or terrorists.
But, the powers that be couldn’t care less, no matter how much of the *it’s for the kids* crap they spout, because kids don’t vote, their parents do, and way to many parents are to busy or to uninterested in whats going on to challenge them.
If the kids accessed MySpace at school, and that was specifically forbidden by some school policy that the kids were made aware of, then the suspensions might be justified. (When they were in middle and high school, our kids were forbidden to access the Internet at school, except for school webpages.)
Accessing the same site (no matter how evil or racist it might be) from the kid’s home or someone else’s home shouldn’t be cause for suspension, but the parents should be doing the discipline rather than the school.
Suspended for LOOKING at the comment?
So, following that example going into the bathroom to and reading a rude comment or crossing the street to read graffiti also merits a suspension.
Are we on the luge ride to gross stupidity or what?
“A lot of these kids have a really crass way of speaking to each other that parents don’t know about,”
Well Duhhh!
I graduated from high school in 1976, and if parents or the principal ever heard the way we “kids” talked to each other in elementary school – let alone middle, or high school – they would have been “shocked”.
The boys with older brothers, or adult relatives who cussed, were the main sources of our profanity.
We weren’t clear on the exact meanings, but we could string them together into impressive-sounding [to us] insults. 🙂
Going into the Navy, right out of high school, didn’t expose me to any language I hadn’t already been using for years – the change was that we could talk that way -openly- for the first time.
Why do I smell a First Amendment violation?
I guess the Superintendent knows the Simpsons first names better then he does the five elements of the First Amendment.
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=4441
Once again, please, give me a break. They weren’t
punished for looking at the site, they were punished
for having their names associated with it, via posting their
pictures there, and listing their names there. They
associated their names with the comments that
caused the whole thing, before, during, and after the fact,
tacitly associating themselves.
Man I’m glad I live in a contrey where my first amendment rights can be trampled on! People need to stop freaking out if some one talks a little trash. I know I talked alot o trash when I was younger.
And don’t get me started about hate speech! I used to live in Casper, wyoming the home town of mathew sheppered and this man use to come to town Rev. Phelps. Technical all he said was hate speech and he’s not being prosicuted!
to Dan….thats because he’s not a middle school student. They don’t have first amendment rights.
that is retarded, and yes i said f—- about 10 times at school today and thats normal at my school and i’m in grade 6 and it’s been normal like that for the past 3 years and i’ve never even got in trouble and far away from suspension and way away from expulsion. i’m one of the light swearers in my class. by the end of 5th grade most kids know what all of the dirty words mean. it’s just really unlucky for that guy to be caught on the internet,
Not sure what to make of the actual story here but…
Public school students do not have the same “rights” as any ordinary citizen walking the streets. There is Supreme Court precedence that allows some limitations to be placed on the rights of the student in school so that the educational environment is maintained without great distraction.
Beyond that citizens shoul realize those rights listed in the Bill of Rights are not unlimited. The rights of the citizen will generally be limited if excercise of a right presents a danger to the public. One is not free to say whatever they want, whenever this wish to.
“…your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”
Was it Lincoln that said this?
Last night I read the Student Handbook. This place is worse then a military school. I was specifically looking for anything relating to off campus behavior but didn’t see anything.
I think if this were the only school my child could attend, she would start home schooling the next day.
It is unconstitutional under Tinker v. Des Moines to suspend students for something that occurs off campus unless it can be proven (very difficult for principals to do) that the actions caused a disruption in the educational process.