The other day a young middle school girl back east was suspended from school for a crass, stupid thing she said about a teacher on her Facebook page. Essentially she wrote that she wished Osama bin Laden had killed her teacher rather than 3,000 other people on 9/11. Truthfully when I read the statement, I didn't perceive it as a death threat, but is was definitely a death wish. The school reacted by suspending the 13 year old from school. The parents contend that this was an overreaction and that they were never called in to discuss the matter with school officials, who have elected to decline public comment.
There has been some discussion about this incident and there are many people who feel that the school was wrong - her parents should have been called in (which I agree with, by the way), and some other type of punishment meted out. I don't agree with that, and here's why:
Suppose this situation had been reversed and it was the teacher who had written these nasty comments on a social network page? Do you think that the girl's parents would have supported a letter of reprimand as punishment? Of course not. They would be demanding the teacher be fired. In this post-Columbine era these types of public comments - by anyone - cannot be brushed aside as adolescent hubris and playfulness online. The remarks were mean-spirited and totally foreign to any concept of a civilized society. School officials could not know whether this was a dumb remark or truly evidence of the state of mind of this young lady.
I suspect that school officials erred in not consulting the parents, and we have not heard why that didn't happen, since the school district is not making comment. But they were more than justified in suspending the student. In fact they could have probably chosen to initiate expulsion proceedings if they had chosen to, but did not.
What I see here are parents, though no doubt well-meaning, who are seemingly exercising a certain lack of parental focus by setting a wrong example for their children. They are blaming the authorities for making the wrong choices of punishment and not following protocol rather than looking for the real problem: right in their own home.
That speaks to accountability. Social networks are a wonderful medium in which the voice of the "average Joe", such as myself, can be heard. But with that comes great responsibility. We all know that are people who chose to publish mean and hurtful things online all day long. And sometimes when those statements move into the area of threats and harassment, it becomes a matter for law enforcement.
I don't suggest at all that this should have happened in this case. But I do imply that instead of focusing on errors school officials may have made in handling this matter, perhaps the parents should have taken the time to understand why the young lady was suspended in the first place and tried to reinforce that at home. 13 years old is not too young to be held accountable for one's actions, and nobody can know what is on a person's mind when vitriol such as this is uttered in a public forum.
It is an ugly incident and I hope lessons are learned all the way around. There's plenty of blame to go around. Fix the problem, tighten procedures and stop passing the buck on online accountability.
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