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Cyberbullying or free speech?

January 17, 2012 By

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear three cases involving students suspended for malicious online comments.

School boards and principals had hoped for guidance on the clash between free speech and civility, reports the LA Times.

A middle school principal in northeastern Pennsylvania was shocked to see his photo online along with a description of him as a “hairy sex addict” and a “pervert” who liked “hitting on students” in his office.

A high school principal north of Pittsburgh saw a MySpace profile of himself that called him a “big fag,” a “whore” and a drug user.

And in West Virginia, a school principal found out that a girl had created an online site to maliciously mock another girl as a “slut” with herpes.

All three students were suspended and filed suit, claiming their free speech rights had been abridged. The two students who charged their principals with misconduct won in the lower courts. The girl who mocked a classmate lost.

Filed Under: Education, Free Speech Tagged With: , , ,

Asian-Americans face more school bullying

October 31, 2011 By

Asian-American students endure more bullying than others, a new study finds. Fifty-four percent of Asian-American teenagers said they were bullied in the classroom, compared to 38.4 percent of blacks, 34.3 percent of Hispanics and 31.3 percent of whites.

The disparity was even more striking for cyber-bullying.

Some 62 percent of Asian Americans reported online harassment once or twice a month, compared with 18.1 percent of whites.

The data comes from a 2009 survey by the U.S. Justice Department and Education Department which interviewed 6,500 students from ages 12 to 18.

Filed Under: Children, Education Tagged With: , ,

Anti-bullying law stresses NJ schools

September 1, 2011 By

A new anti-bullying law requires New Jersey schools to police campuses and online communications to protect students, reports the New York Times. But superintendents and school boards complain they’re being asked to do more with the same resources.

Under a new state law in New Jersey, lunch-line bullies in the East Hanover schools can be reported to the police by their classmates this fall through anonymous tips to the Crimestoppers hot line.

In Elizabeth, children, including kindergartners, will spend six class periods learning, among other things, the difference between telling and tattling.

And at North Hunterdon High School, students will be told that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander when it comes to bullying: if they see it, they have a responsibility to try to stop it.

The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights “demands that all public schools adopt comprehensive antibullying policies (there are 18 pages of “required components”), increase staff training and adhere to tight deadlines for reporting episodes,” reports the Times.

Each school must designate an antibullying specialist to investigate complaints; each district must, in turn, have an antibullying coordinator; and the State Education Department will evaluate every effort, posting grades on its Web site. Superintendents said that educators who failed to comply could lose their licenses.

School officials also worry about lawsuits.

Most bullying complaints involve Internet comments that lead to campus confrontations, says Richard Bergacs, an assistant principal at North Hunterdon High. “It’s gossip, innuendo, rumors — and people getting mad about it.”

This summer, thousands of school employees attended training sessions on the new law; more than 200 districts have snapped up a $1,295 package put together by a consulting firm that includes a 100-page manual and a DVD.

Westfield Superintendent Margaret Dolan worries that students and their parents “will find it easier to label minor squabbles bullying than to find ways to work out their differences.”

The law was motivated by the suicide of a Rutgers freshman, Tyler Clementi, whose gay sexual encounter was secretly filmed and aired online by his college roommate.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Schools liable for cyberbullying

March 18, 2011 By

Under civil rights law, school officials must act to curb harassment of students off campus and after school, including cyberbullying, declares a “Dear Colleague” from the Education Department. From the Daily Caller:

“Harassing conduct may take many forms, including verbal acts and name-calling; graphic and written statements, which may include use of cell phones or the Internet… it does not have to include intent to harm, be directed at a specific target, or involve repeated incidents [but] creates a hostile environment … [which can] limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school,” according to the far-reaching letter, which was completed Oct. 26 by Russlynn Ali, who heads the agency’s civil rights office.

School officials will face lawsuits even when they are ignorant about students’ statements, if a court later decides they “reasonably should have known” about their students’ conduct, said the statement.

. . .  “The school may need to provide training or other interventions not only for the perpetrators, but also for the larger school community, to ensure that all students, their families, and school staff can recognize harassment if it recurs and know how to respond… [and] provide additional services to the student who was harassed in order to address the effects of the harassment,” said the letter.

Facebook is adding a feature that will let users “report content to someone in their support system (like a parent or teacher),” Facebook announced March 11 after the White House conference on school bullying. Presumably some children will report perceived harassment to a teacher or principal, making the school responsible for doing something about it.

The National School Board Association objects to expanding schools’ ‘legal risks,” reports Reason.

The remedies being pushed by administration officials will also violate students’ and families’ privacy rights, disregard student’s constitutional free-speech rights, spur expensive lawsuits against cash-strapped schools, and constrict school official’ ability to flexibly use their own anti-bullying policies to manage routine and unique issues, said the NSBA letter.

School officials have a responsibility to protect students from bullying and harassment when they’re in school. Making that a 24/7 obligation . . . It’s too much to ask.

Update: Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, plans to introduce legislation requiring schools that receive federal aid to report bullying to the federal government and specify whether disabled students were involved.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Schools try to control cyberbullying

June 28, 2010 By

Schools — especially middle schools — are trying to figure out how to respond to cyberbullying, reports the New York Times. Educators are reluctant to assert authority over what students do on their own time. Some parents wants schools to intervene; others say it’s none of the school’s business.

. . . one 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologists who defined bullying as “willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected.

The law is unsettled. So far, “rulings have been contradictory,” the Times reports.

The principal of Benjamin Franklin Middle School in New Jersey asked parents to ban social networking for their children. Meredith Wearley, the school’s seventh-grade guidance counselor, spends much of her time dealing with “cyberdrama.”

“In seventh grade, the girls are trying to figure out where they fit in,” Mrs. Wearley said. “They have found friends but they keep regrouping. And the technology makes it harder for them to understand what’s a real friendship.”

Because students prefer to use their phones for texting rather than talking, Mrs. Wearley added, they often miss cues about tone of voice. Misunderstandings proliferate: a crass joke can read as a withering attack; did that text have a buried subtext?

The girls come into her office, depressed, weeping, astonished, betrayed.

. . . They show Mrs. Wearley reams of texts, the nastiness accelerating precipitously.

“It’s easier to fight online, because you feel more brave and in control,” an eighth-grade girl tells the Times. “On Facebook, you can be as mean as you want.”

Online harassment can begin in fourth grade. By high school, cyberbullies are craftier but their victims tend to be more resilient.

A few families have successfully sued schools for failing to protect their children from bullies. But when the Beverly Vista School in Beverly Hills, Calif., disciplined Evan S. Cohen’s eighth-grade daughter for cyberbullying, he took on the school district.

After school one day in May 2008, Mr. Cohen’s daughter, known in court papers as J. C., videotaped friends at a cafe, egging them on as they laughed and made mean-spirited, sexual comments about another eighth-grade girl, C. C., calling her “ugly,” “spoiled,” a “brat” and a “slut.”

J. C. posted the video on YouTube. The next day, the school suspended her for two days.

Cohen, a music industry lawyer in Los Angeles, won a $107,150 in costs and legal fees  from the district after a federal judge ruled the video hadn’t caused the school “substantial” disruption.

Judge Wilson also threw in an aside that summarizes the conundrum that is adolescent development, acceptable civility and school authority.

The good intentions of the school notwithstanding, he wrote, it cannot discipline a student for speech, “simply because young persons are unpredictable or immature, or because, in general, teenagers are emotionally fragile and may often fight over hurtful comments.”

The lawyer father said he told his daughter the video “wasn’t a nice thing to do,” but kept it on  YouTube “as a public service” so viewers can see “what kids get suspended for in Beverly Hills.”

Filed Under: Children, Parenting, technology Tagged With: ,

'Sexters' threatened with suspension

June 23, 2010 By

New York City’s public school students caught “sexting” — sending explicit messages or photos — will face a 90-day suspension — even if they’re sexting at home on their own time.

Under proposed new rules, students also could be suspended for “cyber-bullying” a classmate.

Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union said public schools should not regulate activities outside schools. Unless sexting is narrowly defined, she said, students could be punished for harmless love notes.

Most sexting starts as a consensual act: A girl sends a sexy message to her boyfriend. If he sends it on to a few friends, it can get nasty. But I can’t see that adolescent foolishness is the school’s business.

Cyber-bullying is a tougher call because the victim may be afraid to come to school.

Beware of nattering nanny-staters, says Hot Air.

Filed Under: Children, Culture Tagged With: , , ,

Principal asks parents to ban social networks

April 29, 2010 By

To stop cyber-bullying, a New Jersey principal is asking parents to ban social networking for their middle schoolers. In an e-mail, Anthony Orsini, principal at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey, also asked parents to tell children they’ll be using parental control software to monitor “every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend.”

. . . there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None.

The principal also urged parents not to allow students to have a computer in their bedroom, saying more than 90 percent of homework doesn’t require a computer.

Dealing with the emotional fall-out from nasty rumors and gossip spread on social networking sites takes up 75 percent of her day, says Meredith Wearly, the school’s guidance counselor.

The principal urged parents to tell the police and demand an investigation if their child is the victim of online or texted attacks.

So far, response from parents has been positive, Orsini says. Children hate the idea.

Filed Under: Parenting, technology Tagged With: ,

Online teacher 'hate' is free speech

February 17, 2010 By

A Facebook page called “Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever met!,” was free speech, a federal court ruled last week.  Katherine Evans, now a 20-year-old journalism student, was suspended two years ago for “cyberbullying” her English teacher, reports Wired.

“It was an opinion of a student about a teacher, that was published off-campus, did not cause any disruption on-campus, and was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior,” Magistrate Barry Garber of Florida ruled Friday.

The group featured a photograph of the teacher and an invitation for other students to “express your feelings of hatred.” Evans took it down after a few days.

Recently, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split on two student free speech cases, Wired notes. Both involved students who created fake MySpace profiles of their principal.

The court ruled in favor of a Pennsylvania high school boy who claimed the principal took drugs and kept beer in his desk. The court ruled the profile, created off campus, did not disrupt the school.

But the same court ruled against a Pennsylvania junior high girl who suggested the principal was a sex addict and pedophile. The court said that was disruptive.

It’s a fine line — or no line at all.

Filed Under: Culture, Education, technology Tagged With: , , ,

Cause distress, go to jail

May 7, 2009 By

Prison Awaiting Hostile Bloggers, writes David Kravets on Wired.

Proposed congressional legislation would demand up to two years in prison for those whose electronic speech is meant to “coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person.”

Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Los Angeles, must know this will be shot down on First Amendment muster, he writes. So it’s just a way for legislators to show they’re down on cyberbullying, such as the hoax that lead to the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier.

Sanchez’s bill goes way beyond cyberbullying and comes close to making it a federal offense to log onto the internet or use the telephone. The methods of communication where hostile speech is banned include e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages.

We can’t say what we think of Sanchez’s proposal. Doing so would clearly get us two years in solitary confinement.

If it becomes illegal to “cause substantial emotional distress,” everyone’s in trouble but the Trappists.

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: ,

Banning cyberbullies

December 28, 2008 By

Cyberbullying at school or during school activities will be banned for California students starting Jan. 1.

The law gives school administrators the leverage to suspend or expel students for bullying other students by means of an electronic device such as a mobile phone or on an Internet social networking site like MySpace or Facebook . . .

I’d guess most cyberbullying takes place at home, but perhaps it will help to tell students that online cruelty is against the law.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,