Racist tweets and punishment

If done with school property or on school grounds, the school district has every right to discipline.
If done at home, with private property, it's the parent's job. Seems simple enough to me.

 

An opinion: School shouldn't involve itself at all unless kid associated himself with school via tweet content or handle/avatar. People aren't involved in a single community but many different communities, some of which overlap. Parents and individuals need to take/accept responsibility. In fact, this kind of thing leads people to believe schools are responsible for kids 24/7, which, of course, is impossible.

 

I'd love to hear from some of our SportsJournalists.com teachers like Crimsonace regarding how much of a distraction off-grounds social networking has become - or not become - during the school day.

 

I wonder if the whole social media thing isn't opening a huge Pandora's Box. People have been dropping n-bombs since the day of slavery in the 1600s. Nothing new there. It's just that now stuff has some sort of a platform that others see. And sometimes it shocks them.

I don't know how, or where it is the proper place of a school or any other institution, to punish anyone for their choice of words or sentiments, whether written or verbal. Someone drops a n-bomb or a Gd-bomb, you form your own opinion and life goes on.

If a parent wants to take issue with his own kids' behavior, that's one thing. Many of us had parents who drew the line in some places others might not agree with. But for a public institution to impose some type of penalties for private behavior is overstepping its bounds.

And I think college/high school coaches are wrong for suspending anyone for something said/written privately. If you want to post/tweet "I'm a Nazi and I hate Jews and blacks", that is your right. People are free to agree or disagree, of course. It's like when Ozzie Guillen made remarks supporting Fidel Castro. His personal opinion. Like it or dislike it and move on.

 

Not for anything, but that's life. Whether they run into racist assholes in school, at work or during beer league softball games, they're always going to be out there somewhere. Suspending the kids five days of school or whatever, for an incident that had nothing to do with the school (presumably) isn't going to make them any less racist when they return.

 

Summation of a 2nd Circuit case concerning a local (to me) school:

Doninger v. Niehoff, 527 F.3d 41 (2d Cir. 2008) was a United States Court of Appeals case. The case was heard by a three-judge Second Circuit panel that included Judges Sonia Sotomayor, Loretta A. Preska, and Debra Livingston. The case involved a student at Lewis S. Mills High School in Connecticut who was barred from the student government after she called the superintendent and other school officials "douchebags" in a LiveJournal blog post written while off-campus that encouraged students to call an administrator and "piss her off more". Judge Livingston held that the district judge did not abuse his discretion in holding that the student's speech "foreseeably create[d] a risk of substantial disruption within the school environment," which is the precedent in the Second Circuit for when schools may regulate off-campus speech On October 31, 2011, the United States Supreme Court declined to grant certiorari on Ms. Doninger's appeal.

Difference being, Doninger's speech disrupted with school function, which is a pretty standard test, assuming this is 1st amendment speech...

 

The school was Gloucester High in Massachusetts, and the students received suspensions from participating in sports and activities -- NOT suspension from school itself.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, every school has a student conduct handbook that covers extracurricular activities. It gives the school fairly wide latitude in punishing students for words and acts that have nothing to do with any school event directly. The idea is that you're representing your school, and that's a privilege, and that privilege can be taken away at any time. Given that the suspended students identified themselves, in most cases, as being from Gloucester High, it would have been tricky for the school to have them in a game, especially if they're playing along side or against black people.

It seems like law is still being worked out on what actions schools can take regarding social media. For example, if a kid is getting bullied by classmates on social media, is it the school's business? (My son's high school principal said the school has had to break up fights that started with Facebook trash-talking, so in that case, yeah.) This story about a case in Mississippi is interesting, in that the court used the Tinker v. Des Moines (all you j-majors should know that one) test that says freedom of speech doesn't end at the schoolhouse door, but speech that has a disruptive effect isn't protected.

http://www.wassom.com/high-school-okd-to-suspend-student-for-rapping-about-dirty-coaches.html

This story is a year old, but it's an interesting compendium of how courts have been all over the map on what schools can do.

http://www.wassom.com/social-media-and-student-discipline-in-public-schools.html

 

People like to say this, but school isn't life. School is a place that kids are required to be and therefore has to come with a set of rules that applies in something other than "take it or leave it" fashion, because nobody can "leave it." Plus, they're kids -- people who are protected until age 18 in all other walks of life for the simple fact that they're judged not ready to make decisions on their own and need some guidance.

Also: It's also life that being a racist asshat on social media can cost you jobs, college admission, friends, and all kinds of other consequences. That would be an equally worthwhile "that's life" lesson to teach kids.

 

Interesting. I wonder what would have have happened if the students didn't participate in any after-school activities?

I can't argue with your last point. I'd much rather see these students suffer social castigation (though I'm aware how pollyanna-ish it is to believe popular students would suffer social repercussions for racism) than school-administered discipline, but you're not wrong.

As to your first point, I'm not sure they're really "protecting" anyone here. The tweets were directed at an NHL player, not other students, and they're only being suspended from after-school activities.

I just the think the idiot kids outed themselves as racists and other students will make their own judgments about them.

If I were their parents, though, they damn sure would lose a lot of privileges, including, but not limited to, use of their cell phone and personal computer (if they had one).

All that said, I have to agree with whoever said that I'm not going to lose much sleep if a couple of asshole kids can't play lacrosse for a few games because they're stupid.

 

haha, it'd have to be lacrosse they get suspended from, not track or baseball... Nothing like reinforcing stereotypes.

 

Or it could be that lacrosse is essentially the spring equivalent of hockey ... :

 

The parents will handle it - because there's no way these kids learned to think and speak like this at home. No way.