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Student free-speech decision

January 21, 2009 By Anne Leave a Comment

It may not be the last decision in a federal court on this case (Avery Doninger’s lawyer said it may need to go to the Supreme Court). It was a mixed decision, reflecting how complicated student free-speech cases in the digital age are. In Doninger’s case against Lewis S. Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., the Student Press Law Center reports, “US District Court Judge Mark Kravitz decided [Mills High School principal] Niehoff and Superintendent Paula Schwartz were entitled to qualified immunity, which protects ‘public officials from lawsuits for damages, unless their actions violate clearly established rights’,” the judge said in the ruling. Doninger, he said, hadn’t clearly established her First Amendment right “to criticize her principal in an off-campus blog that used coarse language,” the report added. Judge Kravitz cited two somewhat conflicting cases in his opinion: “Bethel School District v. Fraser, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a student’s lewd and vulgar speech was not protected on-campus, and Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which recognizes First Amendment protection for student speech on-campus as long as it does not substantially disrupt school, demonstrating a confusion among courts about which standard to apply to Internet student-speech cases,” according to the Student Press Law Center. According to the Associated Press, the judge did let stand Doninger’s claim that her right to free speech was “chilled” when the school “prohibited students from wearing T-shirts that read ‘Team Avery’ to a student council election assembly. That matter can proceed to trial.”

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Filed Under: Law & Policy, School & Tech, school policy Tagged With: doninger, First Amendment, Tinker

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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