Cyberbullying: court must resolve conflicting rulings

The Supreme Court’s decision against hearing student speech cases involving online attacks on school officials leaves in place conflicting lower-court free-speech rulings that eventually will have to be resolved by the high court.

The court declined to hear appeals on a pair of cases from Pennsylvania and West Virginia testing the reach of school officials enforcing district policies intended to stop abusive cyberbullying by students.

In two Pennsylvania districts, an appeals court rejected the suspension of two students who had created offensive MySpace profiles of school officials on their home computers. An eighth-grader had been suspended for calling her school principal a “hairy sex addict” and a “pervert” who liked “hitting on students.” The posting also mocked the principal’s wife and children.

A high-school senior in another district was suspended after calling his principal a “whore” and drug user. The suspensions were upheld by lower courts but overturned by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.

In its rulings, the court said that allowing schools to punish students for off-campus speech would give school officials “dangerously broad censorship discretion.” It said that schools, except in limited circumstances, “cannot punish a student for expressive conduct that originated outside of the schoolhouse.” Neither case, the court noted, had caused any disruption at the schools. The rulings favored students’ free-speech rights.

However, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in West Virginia said a school district had the right to suspend a senior who made fun online of another girl she called a “slut” with a venereal disease. School officials said the “hate website” violated their policy against harassment and bullying. The court rejected the suspended student’s free-speech claim, noting that she had “used the Internet to orchestrate a targeted attack on a classmate.”

School officials are caught between the First Amendment rights of their students and the demands of a society intent on stopping student cyberbullying on social networking sites that sometimes ends in tragic consequences. The lower-court rulings add to the confusion that will continue until the Supreme Court sets guidelines on how far school officials can reach into the homes and private lives of their students.