School bullies move online; rules tricky to write, enforce
Posted on Sunday, April 6, 2008
The Internet has become a school’s new bathroom wall.
Like the scrawling of decades ago, a student’s strategic online postings today can destroy reputations, end relationships and intensify negative feelings.
A change in state law last year requires school districts to adopt discipline policies banning harmful and disruptive online behavior. As Arkansas districts adopt the change, administrators are walking a delicate line between protecting student speech and cutting distractions out of schools.
Cyberbullying, the word for using electronic devices to convey intimidating or harassing messages, received additional attention last month when several national media outlets interviewed Fayetteville High School sophomore Billy Wolfe.
Wolfe sued several classmates, claiming they had injured him after soliciting classmates to physically harm him. They did it on Facebook, an online social-networking site popular among high school and college students.
Wolfe’s March 6 filing in Washington County Circuit Court accuses a group of students of physically assaulting him in March 2007 as he tried to leave one of his classes at Woodland Junior High School.
Wolfe and his mother, Penney Wolfe, kept a record of alleged attacks. They photographed his bruises and collected video of beatings on school buses. They said the Fayetteville district did little to prevent the attacks or punish the other students involved.
Some classmates formed a Facebook group called “Everyone that hates Billy Wolfe,” inviting others to join. Facebook group members can post photographs and videos and create conversation threads to discuss common interests.
While refusing to discuss specifics on Wolfe’s case, Fayetteville assistant superintendent Ginny Wiseman said her district incorporated behavioral expectations into its policies on computer network use as early as 2002.
Administrators revised the policies several times to keep up with changing technology and, most recently, to align with changes in state law, she said.
Wiseman said that if principals discover an online posting is causing harm to a student or distractions in the classroom, they first call students’ parents to make them aware of the posting and ask to have it removed.
Chelsea Kendrick, 16, a junior at Fayetteville High School, said she remembers when a girl in her fifth-grade class took a personal dispute online.
The girl had thrown rocks at Kendrick, then 12, outside school, she said. The fight’s tone changed when the girl spread rumors on the networking site MySpace and urged classmates to isolate her.
“It’s like a whole ’nother community,” Kendrick said.
The messages stung, she said. She walked through hallways at school embarrassed by her tears, afraid of reactions from classmates, and she lost several friends. Kendrick’s parents were shocked when she showed them the posting. They called the girl’s parents and asked school officials to keep the two separated. “That kind of stuff, I don’t think a person can handle alone,” she said. Wiseman said students don’t understand how influential electronic communication can be in the educational climate. “We’re kind of surprised at what’s happening these days. I think the world is surprised,” she said. “What we used to experience as kids, if you got in a fight with somebody about a boy, you’d have a verbal confrontation and that would be it.” HARASSMENT OF STAFF Facebook groups or MySpace postings can do more than hurt feelings, Wiseman said.
Whispered conversations, defensive confrontations and violence can result from online activities, making it difficult for students to stay in school.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates that 34 percent of students have been the victim of cyberbullying, 21 percent of students have perpetrated online harassment, and 68 percent of those harassed online also experience off-line aggression.
However, many high-profile cases of online harassment in Arkansas schools have been directed at teachers, not students.
A bill signed into law by Gov. Mike Beebe in February 2007 required public schools to amend existing 2003 bullying policies to prohibit bullying “by an electronic act,” even if it originated off campus. Schools statewide display anti-bullying signs in buses, restrooms and hallways to notify students of the rule.
The bill was introduced by state Rep. Shirley Walters, RGreenwood, after the Greenwood School District lost a federal lawsuit against two honors students who sued after the school suspended them for a Web site they created at home outside of school hours.
In 2005, then-students Ryan Kuhl and Justin Neal successfully argued that the three-day suspension violated their First Amendment rights. The two were disciplined after teachers and school staff complained that they couldn’t focus on teaching because of satirical comics on the site.
Wiseman said it’s difficult to track instances of cyberbullying in Fayetteville schools because the incidents often fall under the umbrella of other behaviors. The most memorable incidents of punishable activity were directed at faculty and staff, she said. In one case, a teacher complained that she couldn’t focus her class after students posted “untrue and unfounded” messages on a Web log, or blog. In another, a bus driver noted an unruly environment on his route after students traded online exchanges about him. The policy has provided a useful tool for dealing with difficult situations, Wiseman said. CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS Arkansas’ online bullying law is more restrictive than what most states have. The rule includes a clause that permits school administrators to discipline students for activities that occur outside school if they create “a significant disruption” to the education environment.
That means a student could be punished on Monday for a post he created at home on MySpace on a Saturday night.
Seven states have adopted rules regarding cyberbullying in the past year. In Oregon, lawmakers attempted to pass a similar rule limiting online activities outside of school, but the American Civil Liberties Union blocked the measure in court.
“If the student hears in the classroom that they have a First Amendment right but in practice they have none, we’re really not teaching them anything,” said Holly Dickson, staff attorney for the Arkansas chapter of the ACLU.
Dickson contributed to several revisions of the Arkansas cyberbullying bill, but it’s still too broad to hold up to a court challenge, she said.
While no students have questioned the law’s enforcement, a future court challenge is not out of the question, Dickson said. Such a battle would strain the resources of small school districts.
School boards have adopted the policy with some hesitation, citing constitutional concerns.
When the Springdale School Board adopted the policy in February, deputy superintendent Hartzell Jones encouraged administrators to exercise discretion when enforcing it.
Students can be expelled or suspended for violating the policy, especially if their violations are part of a repeated pattern of poor behavior, but most principals confront students before taking such measures. None of the largest Northwest Arkansas districts searches for hurtful content, instead enforcing the policy on a complaint-driven basis.
ONLINE REACTIONS In the wake of national media reports about the Wolfe case, a group of Fayetteville High students has sought to demonstrate that the Internet has positive implications.
A Facebook group called “Not Everyone Hates Billy Wolfe” drew 415 members from around the world who used the group to discuss solutions to bullying in schools.
On March 25, a day after Wolfe’s story appeared in The New York Times, three students formed a group called “The Whole Story,” which quickly attracted 690 members. Bullying at Fayetteville is not unique, the students argued; it’s typical of any American high school.
School administrators released a statement claiming that media coverage had been biased against them and that they can’t discuss discipline specific to the Wolfe case because it would violate student privacy laws.
Jonathan Cox, 18, a Fayetteville High graduate and freshman English major at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, joined the group to defend his former school’s disciplinary practices, which has been questioned by readers nationwide.
“What struck me is that I never really felt that air of bullying in Fayetteville,” Cox said.
Kendrick, the student who was bullied on MySpace, joined more than 330 students in a Facebook group called “Not Cool, Billy Wolfe Haters,” to show support for her classmate. She’s never met Wolfe, she said, but she still receives negative text messages from other students about him. If schools want to stop bullying, they can’t ignore online activity, she said. “I was terrified that people were going to look at me differently, and they did,” she said. “I was afraid that people were going to treat me differently, and they did.” To contact this reporter: eblad@arkansasonline. com
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