As noted by NSBA Legal Clips, the Washington Post had a story on a student yearbook staff in Bethesda, MD using Facebook pictures to fill in the empty space in their annual yearbook. 



Besides the obvious usage and crediting problems the yearbook now
faces, this is an interesting case because of the shady gray line between on-campus and
off-campus speech. Increasingly, students are engaging in activities
(such as Internet activities) off-campus, which are being drawn into the school. As this article shows, these instances of speech or other activity are often being drawn on-campus by other students and sometimes by school personnel (I know several principals who troll myspace and facebook looking for student speech that affects the school). In this case, the yearbook staff (apparent facebook members) pulled a few pictures of their friends and put them in the yearbook (including one with students at a party holding plastic red cups).

Anyway, it begs a couple of questions. First, can we hold students accountable for speech/activities that occurred off-campus that were brought on-campus by other students? Yes, clearly we can (think of a threat to the school). However, perhaps the better question is should we hold students to a lesser standard in those cases? What if the little red cups were beer bottles? Should we punish? Is it really affecting the school so much that it warrants administrator intervention? Is this not a parental responsibility?

Secondly, however, what do we do with the students that are bringing the speech on-campus? Are these students not contributing to the disruption by talking about the speech? If they had never accessed and published the speech around campus, the school would never have been disrupted. They are a but-for cause of the school disruption. However, now that I have you thinking that way, let me again refer to the threat to the school scenario where we clearly want students to report. A rule punishing the student bringing the speech on campus might limit students from speaking up about legitimate threats the students see off-campus.

These are very, very shady gray lines indeed and I am more and more convinced that the present off-campus speech analysis is incapable of handling all but the most clear-cut scenarios. These rules were born in a time before the Internet, before camera phones, before text messages, before e-mail. These rules were born in a time when a student's only method of bringing off-campus speech on-campus was to actually bring the written document or actually speak on the topic. However, that time is over and the world is a much different place for students growing up today in terms of how they can communicate with their friends. Frankly, it is time to consider some new rules specifically for off-campus speech issues to address these vast gray areas where principals are largely left to their own devices without any clear guidance from the courts.

One last comment however. Schools need to be extremely careful here. All the school officials I talk to on this issue are gung-ho about prosecuting anything and everything that they can. They feel it is their duty as principals. Not so. There are still some elements of a child's life that are not the school's responsibility. For instance, it is not really the school's responsibility to regulate online conversations between students. If the online conversation is a threat or substantial disruption to the school, fine. But otherwise, the school should leave it to parents to regulate these activities. Not only is that a parent's right and responsibility, it will make their jobs as principals a lot easier.