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By Ryan Greis
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School shootings in Georgia, Oregon and Kentucky -- and the infamous Columbine High School shooting that killed 15 in Littleton, Colo. last year -- have parents and administrators much more concerned about student behavior and discipline than they were just a few years ago.
"It's simply a different world after Columbine," says Raymond Vasvari, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio.
Twenty years ago, if a student got mad at another student and said, "I'm going to kill him," school officials probably would have thought it was just a threat for a fistfight, according to Paul Berninger, general counsel for the Norwood School District.
But after so much publicity about school shootings involving previously non-violent kids, school officials no longer easily dismiss any threat. Many jokes, statements and school projects about guns or violence have drawn suspensions or expulsions.
For example, in possibly the best-known local case, Madeira High School suspended an honor-roll student for 10 days for posting a student-election sign parodying the movie Speed. The sign, placed in a bathroom, told students to stay on the toilet seat until they contributed to the campaign, or a bomb under the toilet would explode.
So is this new disciplinary dragnet clashing with students' Constitutional rights? What rights do students have?
The courts have generally allowed school officials to restrict certain student behavior in order to maintain order, including searching lockers, using metal detectors and restricting student newspapers, Vasvari says.
"It's generally accepted that students have diminished First Amendment rights on campus," Vasvari says.
The 14th Amendment gives public-school students facing discipline the right to a hearing before the punishment is served. But Vasvari said about 90 percent of the Ohio ACLU's student-rights court cases deal with the First and Fourth Amendments: freedom of speech and the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
One landmark U.S. Supreme Court case generally defines students' free-speech rights at school: Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969. Another case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, established certain restrictions on student press rights in 1988, according to attorney Richard Goehler, who specializes in free-speech cases for the law firm Frost and Jacobs.
In Tinker v. Des Moines -- a kind of Roe v. Wade for student rights -- a student wore a black armband to protest the Vietnam War, and the school ordered her to remove it. Four years later, the Supreme Court vindicated the student by saying students do not surrender their rights to free speech when they enter public schools.
Before Tinker, Berninger says, schools assumed they had total control over students. Since then, the courts have been steadily clarifying how far the Constitution reaches into the classroom.
Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier represented a significant change in direction. School administrators prevented a high school newspaper from printing a story about teen pregnancy, and the Supreme Court backed them. The court concluded schools could restrict the content of school-sponsored publications if there were legitimate educational concerns, Goehler says. But Tinker v. Des Moines carries more weight because it applies to all speech instead of just school-backed publications.
Although Goehler doesn't know of any local cases where the new, zero-tolerance philosophy has eroded students free-speech rights, he says he wouldn't be surprised if it happens. Often students do not challenge abuses of their rights because they want letters of recommendation from teachers or because the newspaper advisor fears being fired.
Vasvari has noticed more schools trying to restrict student behavior outside of school. A suburban Cleveland school recently suspended 11 students for building a gothic-themed Web site on an off-campus computer. The suspensions were lifted after an ACLU lawsuit.
"There's simply no controlling federal authority to do that," Vasvari says.
The ACLU of Ohio has defended and won 12 similar cases in which students were punished for off-campus, online speech.
This school year's disciplinary policies for kindergarten to eighth grade in the Cincinnati Public Schools cover any behavior on school property or involving the "school family."
After reading the policy, Vasvari wonders how far administrators would push it. Would two students arguing outside school get in trouble?
John Concannon, attorney for the school district, says the intention is to monitor behavior at school functions and on school property, but not to get involved with a fight between two students at home.
Vasvari also questioned the high-school policy of mandatory suspension and possible expulsion for "gang activity." The policy bars "clothing, jewelry, colors, or insignia, which intentionally identifies the student as a gang member" and gatherings of two or more people who engage in "activity or discussion promoting gangs."
But the district doesn't apply complete zero-tolerance standards to this policy, according to Concannon.
"We're careful about this," he says.
Some of the reaction to Columbine and other school shootings is due to administrators' fear of legal liability, which has led to a new level of specificity in school rules, Berninger says.
Administrators worry that if they allow a student to wear a black trench coat, and the student later shoots someone, lawyers will grill them in court, demanding to know why they didn't do anything to a student with such an "obvious" sign of problems.
The rules, such as the Cincinnati schools policies, are an attempt to show that schools have covered all their bases, according to Berninger. So schools have banned everything from black trench coats, to fluorescent-colored hair, to gang symbols -- which Vasvari says has even included hair braided in cornrows.
Yet all this worrying -- especially in more affluent suburbs -- flies in the face of an important fact. School crime rates have decreased overall since 1993, according to a 1999 School Survey on Crime and Safety, a joint report by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
"It's the plane crash syndrome," Vasvari says.
Flying is statistically the safest way to travel, but you wouldn't know it by the way the press covers plane crashes.
Likewise, despite the tone of media coverage of school shootings, students are three times as likely to be a crime victim outside school, according to the survey.
While the new zero-tolerance policies might make a good legal defense and make parents feel better, Vasvari says they're aimed at perceived problems rather than what's really going on in the schools. ©
