USA Today: Student’s expulsion feeds debate on online rights
USA Today reports on a case in Tennessee concerning privacy, free speech and the Internet:
Taylor Cummings, 17, a senior at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School, had been butting heads with his coaches. He logged onto Facebook at home on Jan. 3 and wrote, among other things, “I’ma kill em all.”
He was suspended the next day and expelled Jan. 14, Cummings and his family say.
School officials decline to discuss the case but say they have suspended and expelled students in the past for infractions that involved social networks, text messaging, e-mail and other technologies. [...]
Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, says schools are wrestling with how to handle students’ free-speech and privacy rights online.
Recent cases include the suspension in suburban Syracuse, N.Y., last month of a seventh-grader who created a Facebook page that school officials say included obscene postings about a teacher.
The Supreme Court has yet to weigh in, so “the jury is still out on whether courts are going to allow schools to punish students for this type of speech,” says Catherine Crump, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney.
The ACLU believes schools don’t have the authority to punish students for speech out of school, Crump says. [...]
Taylor, who has no history of school violence or suspensions, wrote a letter apologizing to his coach. He says the posts weren’t meant to be taken literally and he never intended to hurt anyone.
The family appealed the expulsion to a board made up of principals from other schools; it was upheld last week.
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