The right of students to free speech has been a concern of mine since I was an editor of my high school newspaper, and found myself attending local government meetings to battle a case of school censorship. Now I'm even more concerned, as schools have taken it upon themselves to extend their reach of censorship outside the school walls and into cyberspace, attacking communications that students have on their own websites, on MySpace, and via every conceivable electronic means.
Courts have held that "off-campus speech is punishable if people on campus are reasonably likely to learn about the speech" and if "the speech causes school officials to expend any substantial amount of time responding to it," according to a brief just released by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. Excerpts from the brief appear below:
To a greater and greater degree, young people live their lives online -- they form and dissolve relationships, collaborate in playing games or creating works of art, and furnish the real-time minutiae of their daily lives for their friends to follow. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that more than half of all teenagers have created and posted content to the internet so that they could be considered "publishers." For this generation and those to come, to say that government can regulate their "electronic communication" is meaningless; there is no other communication...
The creep of government regulatory authority into students' off-campus expression should concern anyone who values the free exchange of ideas on the internet...If we are not vigilant, what happens to student speech today could impact all online speech tomorrow...
As we have seen, administrators frequently invoke "disruption" as a pretext to suppress speech that is merely factual and critical. Journalism, when practiced at its best, is meant to be provocative; that is, to cause people to talk...
...[I]f a student's off-campus website asks community members to contact the principal's office to urge the school to recycle, it should be beyond dispute that the website is protected speech even if the principal's email box is bombarded with messages. That we can no longer be confident of the answer exposes the fatal weakness in attempting to cram off-campus speech into an ill-fitting on-campus framework...
Factual -- and yes, critical -- coverage of school affairs by student journalists has never been more important. Established media companies are in financial free-fall, slashing jobs and cutting news space, with education reporting among the unavoidable casualties...If students are not free to report frankly on the goings-on in their schools, the community may never learn that "temporary" trailer classrooms have become permanent, that restrooms are dangerously unsanitary, or that campuses are prowled by gangs...
If the publication of a student's speech does not take place on school grounds, at a school function, or by means of school resources, then a school cannot punish the speaker without violating her First Amendment rights. Censorship carries real human costs...
A student will have a much more difficult time clearing his name and pursuing a successful future if branded guilty of disrupting classes and sent to "alternative school," as Justin Layschock [who ridiculed his principal on MySpace] originally was before his parents interceded and got his punishment reduced. The practical difficulty of overturning a disciplinary decision -- with the principal as accuser, judge, jury and executioner -- and the lasting consequences of an unjust conviction, counsel strongly in favor of restraint...
Unless school administrators are required to...work within narrow and specific parameters constraining their power to punish -- then valid, protected, non-disruptive speech will be lost.
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