"Blog Bullies" Busted in Bad-Word Brouhaha (Advanced Students Edition)
Reader ChicagoTom sends along this tale of blogging gone wild from the Windy City:
Three male students at Taft High School -- seventh- and eighth-graders in an Advanced Placement program -- were disciplined Wednesday after obscene and threatening remarks were posted about Taft staff on a Web log that reportedly had a teacher in tears when discovered this week.
The Chicago Sun-Times ran some redacted versions of the blog posts:
Posted Nov. 3
"She'll see oh yes, there will be blood, well no that's just this damn pen that exploded, and no, I won't kill her … yet … however … Ms. ------'s neck will be … slit like a …… chicken! Now…WHO DO I HAVE TO KILL BESIDES… MS. ------!!SHE'S SOO SHORT!!!!!
Posted Nov. 23
"….Yes, Ms. ---, she [obscene act deleted], literally I mean what do you think she does in that secret little back room of hers''
The comments were posted at online community Xanga and the students have been suspended. The legal issues surrounding this sort of thing are pretty interesting. As the Sun-Times notes, this stuff was done off-site and--any sort of credible threats of violence aside--there's a precedent to let it go:
Twenty years ago, a judge in Maine ruled that school officials had no right to punish a student who extended his middle finger to a teacher at a restaurant parking lot outside school hours.
More here.
In other student-related news, Eric Berlin sends along this story from Kansas in which a student was initially suspended for speaking Spanish at lunchtime.
