preview

Limiting Student Online Speech

Decent Essays

Should Schools Be Allowed to Limit Students’ Online Speech?
The purposes of schools include protecting and educating its students. Therefore, naturally, when a student is cyberbullying someone else, the school seeks to intervene. However, many argue that a school’s intervention of its students’ online speech is in violation of their First Amendment rights. Should schools be allowed to limit students’ online speech? That is, should schools be allowed to punish the things its students post online, even if they are done outside of school, and from their personal devices? The answer is clearly yes. From the concept, to the precedence, to the data, to a letter from the US Department of Education, evidences everywhere supports limiting students’ …show more content…

v. Berkeley County Schools (Document C). K.K., who formed a discussion group online that accused a classmate of being sexually promiscuous and was joined by more than 20 other classmates, was suspended from school for 10 days and issued a 90-day “social suspension.” On July 27, 2011, the US Court of Appeals ruled that the punishment was just, stating that the “[connection] of K.K’s speech to [the high school’s teaching] interests was sufficiently strong,” and that school officials are “trustees of the student body’s well-being.” When a speech disrupts the interests of the school – that is, teaching and protecting its students, it is then not protected by the First Amendment, and schools should punish its speaker. Even though the speech was off-campus, the sufficient connection of the speech to the interests of the school means that the school has the right to punish the …show more content…

Document A shows that nearly twenty percent of students are cyberbullies, and more than twenty percent of students have been cyberbullied. According to Document B, cyberbullying affects one in ten teachers personally. Cyberbullying affects the privacy, confidence, productivity of teachers and students alike. It is as large a problem as actual bullying, and the quick spreading of everything posted online amplifies the effects of cyberbullying. Schools everywhere concentrate so much of their effort to combat on-campus bullying, they have no excuse to overlook cyberbullying, which affects as many people, and as at least as dangerous as actual

Get Access