Myspace and School Districts

Should schools interfere with things that go on on Myspace? If a student makes a profile of a teacher, what right does the school have to discipline the student? What legal right does a school district have concerning things that are written or done on the internet, which is technically off school district property?

Even though Myspace, according to most teens, is so last year, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/28/AR2006102800803.htm) I thought that this would still be a good discussion point. Last year, I made a Myspace Profile for one of my teachers along with a friend. We put a picture of her up, creating a fake profile with funny things, and basically everyone in the class got a huge laugh out of it. It was jokes about her hair, the way she spoke, and her hair style (it was short). We did this because she was a god awful teacher and we all hated her. It relieved some of the stress of the class. There were a few other Myspace teacher profiles that were worse then the one I created, so I didn’t bother with them. Come late November, I heard that school administrators and the security staff (two police officers and two former members of the FBI) had discovered the Myspace that I created and were taking students out of class and questioning them as to who created it. At the end of December, I was finally pulled out of a class and sat in a room alone after my cell phone had been taken away from me. I sat for about a half hour before a former FBI woman came in and sat down. For another 45 minutes I sat there, until another one came in and gave me a pad and paper and told me to write down everything I knew. HE said if I didn’t fess up, they would do an IP Search from the County prosecutor’s office ($2000) and I would have to foot the bill if it came back to me. I fessed up. The result for my helping them? Four days suspension. While some may think “Oh well,” the official reason I was suspended was for “sexual harassment” because under Lesbian as her sexual orientation. This punishment was handed down from an assistant principal that was, yes, homosexual.

So what jurisdiction does a school district have in cases such as these? The crime wasn’t on school property and the teacher did not press charges. This type of occurrence is going to occur more and more often in the future.

Technology, Schools, and Grades

At the high school that I graduated from last year, comes news that two students have been arrested for “computer theft after authorities said they hacked into the school computer system and improved grade records for four other students.” This was only the second year in which the computer system for inputting grades was used. In a time when young teens are very proficient in terms of technology, there has to be more security for a website that holds the grades of over 2000 students. Just think, if an 18-year old student could do it, think about the numerous parents who have the skill and ability to hack into the system. The grades were changed around June and only in September, after one student had gone to college, was the grade changing discovered.

In addition, I learned from friends that the librarian had given out the password to the grade system to several students who were close to her. One of those students, who goes to the University of Pennsylvania now, would log in at her home and view the grades of students “competing” with her to get into several colleges. Everyone knows that nothing (technologically speaking) will ever be hacker-free. People will always find a way. In this town, all a student would have to do is find out the ip-address of server and leave it up to his daddy to do the rest. I am sure that this is not the only place that this has happened. So what can be done? School districts all across the country will undoubtedly want to switch from an all paper-based grade system to just inputting grades into a computer. The grading system (I can’t remember the name of it) was slow and often crashed while teachers were inputting their grades (teachers would complain all the time about it). For something as important as grades, shouldn’t it have been tested more for security and performance purposes?

For those interested, here is the news story:

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/16422760.htm