Court Okays Student’s MySpace Principal Parody

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has finally ruled that school officials cannot discipline students for ridiculing their principals on MySpace during their hours away from school. As I discussed last year in the blog here, the Court agreed to re-hear both cases en banc (with the Court's entire 14 judges considering the case). In the first, J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, the judges were sharply split, voting 8-6 to overturn a 10-day suspension of a student who posted a fake profile on MySpace that portrayed the principal as a pedophile and a sex addict. The majority opinion rejected the school district's argument that such lewd speech̵...

Judge Overturns 6-Year-Old’s Expulsion Over Touching

A Philadelphia judge has ruled that a kindergartner should not have been expelled from a charter school because he allegedly touched his teacher’s thighs. Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Paul P. Panepinto, writing an opinion explaining his decision to the Commonwealth Court May 23, said that, on the record before him, no reasonable person would have reached the same decision as the First Philadelphia Charter School for Literacy’s Board of Trustees to expel a student who allegedly touched his teacher’s legs after she complained that they hurt. The decision to expel the kindergartner was arbitrary, capricious and prejudicial to ...

Second Circuit Nixes Student Newspaper’s Sex Ed Cartoon

In late December 2004 or early January 2005, the faculty adviser of the Ithaca High School newspaper, The Tattler, excised a cartoon and article written by a former IHS student entitled: “Alumni Advice: Sex is fun!” The cartoon depicted a doorway with the phrase “Health 101” written over the door. Near the doorway, a teacher pointed to a blackboard that contained eight drawings of stick figures in various sexual positions with the phrase “Test on Monday” written on the blackboard underneath the drawings. In the February 2005 issue of the newspaper, The Tattler editors sought to print the same stick-figure cartoon ...

Tough Talking Prosecutors Betray Girl Bullied to Death

The case involving the death Phoebe Prince drew wide attention when tough talking prosecutors brought felony charges against six students at South Hadley Massachusetts High School, saying that they had tormented Phoebe, a newly arrived Irish immigrant, after she briefly dated the two male defendants. Now those same prosecutors have apparently caved in their effort to hold those accountable for Phoebe's death. Last week, criminal charges against students in the bullying of 15-year-old Phoebe, who hanged herself last year, were largely resolved when three former students were placed on probation and a statutory rape charge against another was dropped. ...

Zero Tolerance = Zero Results

A recently published research brief by Child Trends, Multiple Responses, Promising Results: Evidence-Based, Nonpunitive Alternatives To Zero Tolerance, suggests that zero tolerance school discipline policies have not been proven effective by research and may have negative effects, making students more likely to drop out and less likely to graduate on time. Instead, the brief recommends the use of nonpunitive disciplinary action, such as behavior interventions, social skills classes, and character education. Unfortunately, no one told law student Jason Fuller who just wrote a law review article in the Akron Law Review entitled Corporal Punishment and ...

Sexting Student Sues School

The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit today against Pennsylvania school district for searching a student's confiscated cell phone without probable cause and punishing her for storing semi-nude pictures of herself on the device. The school subsequently turned her phone over to George Skumanick Jr., at the time the Wyoming County district attorney, who threatened to file felony child pornography charges against the girl unless she took a class on sexual violence. The Third Circuit recently threw out the prosecutor's case. "Students do not lose their privacy rights at the schoolhouse door," said Witold Walczak, the ACLU of Pennsylvania's Legal Director and ...

See no evil . . .

A report issued yesterday by attorneys hired by the Lower Merion School District found that the collection of images stemmed not from an effort to spy on students but from "the district's failure to implement policies, procedures and recordkeeping requirements and the overzealous and questionable use of technology by IS personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators." The report also criticized leaders and several members of the IS department as "not forthcoming with the Board, administrators and students about what TheftTrack could do and how they used it," citing incidents demonstra...

1
2
3
s