MySpace school lawsuit
posted in disruptive-technology, isafety, leadership, socialnetworking |I guess this headline should not come as a surprise. After all, we’re talking about TEENAGERS here and highly disruptive and empowering technologies when it comes to websites like MySpace. The headline is “Principal sues students, parents over MySpace page.” (Thanks Devin for the link.) Here’s an excerpt:
Anna Draker, who works at Clark High School in San Antonio, knows the kids behind the [fictitious MySpace] site well. She had been forced to discipline them several times, and was aware of their animosity to her, but apparently did not suspect the lengths to which they would go to get a bit of revenge. Ben Schreiber and Ryan Todd set up a MySpace page in Draker’s name earlier this year which “indicated by implication and by direct statement that Ms. Draker is a lesbian, which she is not.”
Furthermore, the page featured comments from other MySpace users, many of them other Clark students who knew Ms. Draker. These messages were less than complimentary. And it wasn’t just school students; “a few were individuals Ms. Draker did not recognize, that lived near Clark High School, and had made suggestive, lewd and obscene comments based on the content of the webpage.
My first response is, why didn’t the teacher or the school officials directly contact MySpace immediately when they learned about this and ask them to remove the site? Based on what I’ve read and learned about MySpace previously, I think they’d readily comply with this. Instead:
One of the teachers at Clark brought the page to Draker’s attention on April 19, 2006, and Draker claims that since then, she has had “many sleepless nights and worried days regarding this web page and the people who attempted to contact her through the web page.” The situation rattled the school administration enough that Draker’s picture was removed from the school website and a brief video about the dangers of MySpace was posted instead.
The case is significant also because of the liability issues it raises. The parents of the student are being charged with negligence, for not policing what their children were doing online at home:
What sets this case apart from many other lawsuits filed over the content of blogs is that it doesn’t target only the teenagers who created the site. It also argues that the parents were guilty of negligence by failing to supervise their children, and that they bear some of the responsibility for the defaming site. The police were able to determine that the computers used to create the site were located in the students’ homes, and Draker’s lawsuit says that the parents have a duty to know what their children are up to—especially in light of both students’ past run-ins with Draker at school.
“Allowing access to the Internet, unsupervised and without restraint poses an obvious and unreasonable danger that such children would utilize the Internet for illicit purposes such as the ones alleged above,” says the suit in accusing the parents of “negligent supervision.”
Of course this is just a lawsuit, and the court has not ruled in this case, and we need to remember that here in the good ‘ole USA basically anyone can sue anyone for anything, especially if they have the money to pay the lawyers fees. It will be interesting to track this case, however, and whether or not the judge rules in favor of the plaintiff I think the issue of parental responsibility for the online behavior of their students is an extremely important one.
I think this article raises again issues of more parental involvement needed in the lives of our young people, schools blocking DSN sites being an insufficient response, and the overall need we have to embrace SAFE and CONSTRUCTIVE uses of digital social networking tools in schools.
Are students and teachers at your school using Think.com or Imbee yet? If not, why not? If you’re not the one to suggest these ideas and carry the banner of safe DSN education forward in your own locality, who will? If no one does, what will the costs be for the students and families in your community?
The digital natives all around us WILL continue to use these tools, whether DOPA passes or not and even if all schools fill their website homepages with videos about “the dangers of MySpace” and other DSN sites. We need to confront these issues head on together through education, as well as appropriate disciplinary actions by schools. I hope in this case the students who carried out these acts of student to teacher cyberbullying are held accountable for their actions and face appropriate consequences. The fact that they did these things off the school campus and from home, of course, complicates the legal ground the school administrators can stand on in meting out disciplinary actions.
On this day..
- K-12 Online Conference 2008 starts tomorrow! - 2008
- A 2nd grade classroom podcast! - 2008
- NowPublic Citizen Journalism and intellectual property - 2008
- Invite Nobel Prize winners to your classroom - 2006
- Podcast88: Skypecast about When Night Falls - 2006
- Thoughts on teaching and authentic learning - 2006
- Podcasting resources - 2005
- Digital Kids Club - 2005
- Thoughts on "The Crusade Against Evolution" - 2004
- Stolen Kerry Yard Signs / Direct Presidential Elections - 2004
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