Flickr: Zawezome

By Corey G. Johnson

Civil rights groups recently intervened in a free-speech controversy at the San Francisco Unified School District after a school suspended three high school seniors and banned them from graduation and prom over comments they made online.

The students were suspended from George Washington High School after a teacher learned about postings on a Tumblr page called “Scumbag Teachers.” Some of the comments allegedly linked to the students included: “Teaches Pink Floyd for 3 Weeks; Makes Final Project Due In 3 Days” and “Nags Student Govt About Being On Task; Lags On Everything.”

The school principal accused the students of cyberbullying. They were suspended from school for three days, banned from prom and told they couldn’t walk with their classmates during graduation. One of the students was kicked off the student council.

The Asian Law Caucus and ACLU of Northern California said they were concerned that the students’ rights were being violated and wrote letters to district officials questioning whether the students and parents were given due process. The district then reinstated the students.

The district’s initial punitive actions prompted student outrage on other Tumblr sites. One student stated:

Find it ironic how Washington led the American Revolution against the British soldiers for freedom from King George, and here you are, sitting in this school trying to control the students the exact same way the king was, by taxing not our goods, but our freedom of speech. Washington himself would be appalled.

Another student wrote:

What kind of school environment do we live in where Tumblr allegedly is treated like a weapon? Where people are now afraid to write and express their feelings and opinions in a Tumblr community in fear that the adults that are supposed to encourage and teach us the meaning of “freedom” and “free expression” are the ones stamping it down and treating it with a double standard.You know what is ironic? In school we are going over 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Alduous [sic] Huxley. Both are dystopian novels which express a fear of a future in which individual opinions are banned and people live in an authoritarian rule stripped of freedom and self-expression. What is so different from those novels and this situation in this school?

The district, the Asian Law Caucus and ACLU of Northern California all declined to name the school and the students involved. California Watch learned the name of the school from online postings and an interview with a student who attends Washington.

Angela Chan, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said the students’ parents don’t speak English. She said the school didn’t initially provide translators to help the parents understand the school’s decision. And Linda Lye, an attorney with the ACLU, said the Tumblr postings didn’t meet the definition of cyberbullying and weren’t disruptive to the school environment.

“Speech does not become ‘disruptive’ just because a teacher doesn’t like it or finds it offensive,” Lye wrote on the ACLU website. “In fact, criticism of authority figures is exactly the type of speech the Constitution was designed to protect.”

Gentle Blythe, spokeswoman for San Francisco Unified, said the district swiftly reinstated the students once contacted by the civil rights groups. The disciplinary actions have been removed from the students’ records, and they are no longer banned from the prom and graduation.

“We absolutely recognize and value our students’ right to free speech. We also recognize that we need to educate them about responsible speech,” Blythe said in an e-mail to California Watch. “As soon as the district was notified of the school administration’s action, we responded. Part of having authority means recognizing that if you make a mistake you need to correct it.”

Chan said her organization and San Francisco Unified will be working to improve district policies to ensure teachers and administrators are better trained to handle future incidents.

In August 2008, California passed AB 86, one of the first laws in the country to deal directly with cyberbullying. The legislation gives school administrators the authority to discipline students for bullying others offline or online.

Last year, the ACLU intervened at the San Juan Unified School District in Northern California after school administrators at a Citrus Heights-area school suspended a 15-year-old sophomore for cyberbullying. Since then, the organization has responded to at least three separate instances in which different schools have punished students for online writing, Lye said.

This article originally appeared on California Watch. 

David Lofink

The American Civil Liberties Union announced this week that it notified Oroville Union High School District in Northern California that the school is “improperly configured to block access to Web content geared toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.”

Oroville Union isn’t the first to receive this message from the ACLU — a number of schools in Michigan, Kansas, and Missouri received similar notification in March. These actions are part of the ACLU’s “Don’t Filter Me” initiative, combating what the organization sees as the illegal censorship of LGBT educational information via schools’ computers.

In its complaints against schools, ACLU challenges that districts’ Internet filters have been set up to block access to LGBT Web content. The ACLU was prompted to send the letter to the school district when Melina Zancanella, a junior at Oroville High School and president of its gay-straight alliance club, was unable to access Web sites aimed at helping curb suicide among gay teens.

According to Elizabeth Gill, attorney for the ACLU of Northern California, school officials are often unaware that the software provided by filtering companies can censor LGBT-related materials that are not sexually explicit. The ACLU website offers a survey on its site asking high school students about what sort of content is filtered at their schools. Joshua Block, an ACLU attorney who works on the LGBT and AIDS project, notes that while these filters purportedly keep kids safe, “at the same time, they’re letting in content that’s very harmful to LGBT students, like reparative therapy and ex-gay sites, and what’s happening is that because of these viewpoints [and] discriminatory filters, the school is perfectly fine letting kids see material about homosexuality that is anti-gay, but at the same time they’re blocking the students from seeing supportive websites.”

In the recent Speak Up 2010 survey, students listed Web filtering as one of the major barriers to their technology usage at school. Students complain that they aren’t able to access the information they need online in order to complete their assignments because important websites are blocked at school.

Although the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) does mandate that schools and libraries have some sort of filter to protect students from images that are obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors, many school districts go beyond those guidelines and employ filters that block a variety of content. Indeed, some teachers wonder why certain sites, like YouTube, Dropbox, and National Geographic are blocked by Internet filters. Although schools do need to formulate an Internet safety policy and decide what content to filter, broad filters and “brute force technologies” are not the best policy, as Department of Education’s Director of Education Technology, Karen Cator explained about the schools’ responsibilities.

The ACLU’s Block told eSchoolNews that the problem is easy to fix: adjust the filters. That may be easier said than done. The Oroville High School District has not yet commented on the ACLU’s demands that it do just that.