INDIANA — A West Lafayette High School sophomore said she and
several other students were punished last week after criticizing an
administrator on a Facebook group site.
Caitlyn Casseday said she received an in-school suspension on Oct. 5 after
she called an administrator an "ass" on a Facebook group site formed
to support another student who was recently suspended after an altercation in a
computer lab. Casseday and other students believe that the administration
unfairly punished the student and formed the group to protest his suspension.
"I got called into (the assistant principal's office) ... and I
asked 'How can I get in trouble? I have freedom of speech,'"
she said.
Another student was punished for posting a video of the altercation online
and may face expulsion.
West Lafayette School Corporation is one of many school districts across
the nation struggling with how to deal with student speech in online forums.
Just 70 miles southeast in Indianapolis, officials at Carmel High School
expelled a student in 2006 for posting sexually explicit comments about a
teacher.
Courts are also grappling with how far student's freedom of speech
should extend in off-campus, online forums such as MySpace and Facebook.
Currently, a case is pending in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to determine
if a high school violated a students' First Amendment rights when they
punished her for calling administrators "douche bags" on her blog by
removing her from student government.
In West Lafayette, the district is considering a policy that would remind
students that they are legally responsible for anything they post on the
Internet, which is modeled after the policies of other districts in the
state.
Rocky Killion, the West Lafayette School Corporation superintendent, could
not speak about Casseday's case specifically. But he said the district
makes a "case-by-case determination" on when to punish students for
off-campus speech.
"There's not a cookbook approach that says 'If you do
this we'll do that,'" he said.
Killion said that court rulings say that "political speech and
opinion speech" is protected
but that speech that falls outside of
that definition may be regulated. He added that the Student Conduct Code could
be applied whenever students are writing about administrators, teachers or
students online.
"When opinion speech goes beyond the grounds of opinion ... to
derogatory statements, words that are not allowed in our school setting (and)
comments that are threatening ... that's when we'll investigate the
situation," he said.
Killion added that the district also scrutinizes off-campus speech if it
"causes a disruption in the educational process."
The Supreme Court's major student speech ruling, in the 1969 case
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, held that
administrators can only censor speech if they can show that it will cause a
material disruption or invade the rights of others.
"There has to be essentially an immediate forecastable disruption in
the school process," said John Bowen, a journalism instructor at Kent
State University who specializes in student press rights.
Tinker makes no distinction between political speech and speech on
other topics, although the Court in later cases recognized other narrow
content-based exceptions to the Tinker rule. For example, the Court has
held that schools can ban speech that is lewd or that promotes illegal drug use.
However, the Court has yet to determine how these exceptions would apply to
off-campus, independent speech, such as Internet postings.
Casseday said she and other students expressed anger in their posts that
the student who initiated the altercation in the computer lab was not punished,
and that administrators feared for that student's safety. But Casseday denied
that anything she posted could be construed as threatening, as she says
administrators claimed.
Brian Hayes, a journalism instructor at Ball State University who
specializes in high school journalism instruction, said he doubted that
Casseday's comment would qualify as disruptive under the Tinker
standard.
"Is this prohibiting school administrators from doing their job? I
doubt it," he said.
Bowen, the Kent State instructor, also challenged the idea that the Student
Conduct Code could be applied off campus except to students participating in
voluntary extracurricular activities, such as sports teams.
"I don't think the school could enforce it," he said.
"I think the school is way overstretching its authority here."
Casseday said she and other students did not plan to take legal
action.
By Moriah Balingit, SPLC staff writer
