Students Suspended For Creating A Facebook Profile
Most teachers know that their students make fun of them. Especially with teenagers, this is a given. While teachers may expect to be the subject of jokes and rumors, few expect to receive the shock that one teacher at Taylor High School in Cincinnati, Ohio got.
Three students at the high school were suspended for 90 days after they created a Facebook page portraying their teacher as a member of NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. The page identified the teacher with both his first and last name and a photo and referred to him as a pedophile. NAMBLA is an organization that supports sexual activities between adult men and boys.
After the boys were suspended, the Three Rivers School District backed up the school's administrators and voted to uphold the suspensions. The students have hired a lawyer and are suing school officials over the punishment they received.
Their lawyer claims that the Facebook page was a parody and that the boys never claimed that the content of the page was true. They also claim that the web page profile that they created was only able to be accessed by seven people. Each boy has written an apology to the teacher who was the subject of the offending web site profile. An American Civil Liberties Union attorney says that the suspensions may actually violate free speech.
There is a hearing scheduled in the matter of the suspensions on January 10, 2008 and a U.S. District Court judge has ordered that the students be allowed to return to school until the outcome of the hearing.
If the web page that the students created was simply parody, it would be a protected form of free speech. However, the statements contained on the Facebook page that the students created could definitely be considered libelous, and therefore not parody, but malicious defamation of the teacher's character.
The students stand by their claim that the web page profile was a parody, and their lawyer also says that the school district has no right to punish them for something that they did not do on school property or with school equipment. Their lawsuit asks that they be allowed to return to school and the disciplinary action against them in connection with this incident be erased from their school records. They are also asking for unspecified damages and that the school district be ordered to pay their attorneys' fees.
In similar cases, courts have ruled that schools do not have the right to punish students for actions outside of school and school property.
If the students win their lawsuit and are awarded damages in the case, they might be wise to hang on to any settlements that they receive. For most people, being depicted as a pedophile is no laughing matter and definitely an inappropriate subject for a web site profile. Given the contents of the Facebook page that the boys created, the teacher who was the unfortunate subject of the web page may actually have a viable civil case for defamation against the boys for publishing false statements against him that could have damaged both his career and reputation.
As a result of this incident, 14 other teachers at the school have requested that their photos be removed from the district web sites. The students had gotten the photo of the teacher for the Facebook profile from a district web site.
