The same could be said about some parents.
What a precious snowflake we have here. "I want to know who the f%$# told on me,"
If my parents ever heard me talk or write like that when I was twelve, I'd be raking the leaves off the lawn of every house on my block - twice, if I made the mistake of complaining about it.
Maybe the school went a bit far reaching, but how did it get this far in the first place?
I would have been raking leaves as well. And perhaps this kid doesn't have great parents. I don't know. Or maybe she does. Maybe she was punished for using bad language.
This issue is not whether the child has a bad mouth. It's whether the school should take the place of the parent and whether children have any privacy rights in relation to school officials.
More important, it's whether having three staff members and a LE official interrogating a child and demanding her FB password due to some sort of sexual reference made after hours on her FB page, is appropriate.
My opinion is, no.
I don't think this kid should have an FB page, or use foul language or talk about sex with other kids in a public or semi-public forum. But if it is not occurring at school, how the heck is it any of the school's business? At all? Unless there are signs of abuse or criminal intent in those postings, what business is it of theirs?
Listen, I greatly respect teachers and the public education system. I support their unions. I know, having a few in my family, how hard they work. It's no 9-3 job with summers off as people think. Instead, it's working until midnight adapting lesson plans for the seven kids they just dumped in your class of 32, several of them with learning problems or language issues. It's working all summer to get ready for the new load of kids who will bring your class total to 40. It's e-mailing parents repeatedly about kids who have issues because the parents are not involved enough or because they are much too involved. Etc., etc.
But this kind of nonsense gives school staff and public schools a really bad name.
There is much too much to worry about in the real world, like abused kids, learning disabled kids, teachers not doing their jobs and leaving the next teacher with undereducated students, children with parents who do not value education one iota, disruptive students with emotional problems, and so on. IMO, if this school is monitoring one kid's FB page because she called a staffer mean, mediocrity rules at that school because I know exactly how much time they have and what they have to deal with. My mom was a teacher, one of my brothers is a teacher and my sweetheart is a teacher. Many teachers and school administrators can barely take a breath if they are doing their jobs.
IMO, people like thse as well as the ones who forced a kid to eat the chicken nugget pig slop instead of her perfectly good lunch from home, are mediocre at best and mediocrity seems to work as hard as possible to do the wrong thing.
We seem to reward mediocrity much too much in our country. I'm kind of sick of that. This story is just another symptom of our skewed values in that regard. Of course, and again, that is with the caveat that I am assuming there is no more to the story than we already know.
