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The First Amendment also protects the free speech rights of Internet users, including public school students. Can students be punished for a personal homepage written from home, if it talks about a faculty or staff member? Since the Internet is relatively new, a lot of questions about it haven’t been completely answered yet. So we can’t give you THE answer to your question, but we are starting to see some borders of students’ rights on the Internet. Remember, schools can’t control what students say or print on their own time with their own resources and is not physically brought onto school property. Does that mean that schools can never regulate off-campus, personal student web sites? No. But schools can regulate student expression on home web pages only if it poses a serious or “true threat” to a person or group, or if it substantially and materially disrupts the school. Since the Internet is relatively new, the law in this area is still evolving. As the following cases demonstrate, what you can and can’t be punished for saying on a personal website remains unclear. If you think your rights may have been violated, give the ACLU a call. What if I create my homepage as a project in my computer class at school, or if I just use a school computer to create a homepage of my own? Your school has much more control over what you say on your homepage if you create it as part of a school-sponsored activity or use a school computer to create it. Many school districts in Pennsylvania have adopted computer use policies for students who use the school computer systems. Check with your school for the policies that affect you. As with just talking or wearing a T-shirt, if you’re doing it in school, teachers have a lot more authority to restrict what you say or post on the Internet. That changes significantly when you are doing things from your home. Last week, my friend Suzanne sent an e-mail from home to another student at our school. It included a “Top 10 List” she wrote that made fun of our assistant principal. That student got into a fight with Suzanne and showed the e-mail to school officials. They read it and came down on Suzanne. She got suspended for something she said in private and that doesn’t seem fair. As with websites, students have more constitutional protection with e-mail if their activities are done entirely from home. If you send an e-mail from your home computer to a friend’s computer, even if it says nasty things about another student or teacher, the school should not be able to punish you unless you print out the message and bring it to school. If someone else prints out the message and brings it to school, and the message contains material that violates school rules (like no profanity or blatant sexual speech), whoever brought it to school can be punished. Since Suzanne wasn’t the one who brought the e-mail into school, she shouldn’t be the one who gets in trouble. My school library wants to put filtering software on its computers because they say they want to protect students from “inappropriate” sites on the Internet. I’m worried that it’s going to block out all kinds of stuff that teenagers can’t find out about any other way. My friends and I might have questions about sex, being gay or other stuff that’s too hard or embarrassing to get information about. How do we stop them from blocking this information? Schools often block Internet content on school computers, but it’s not clear that they are allowed to do so. A big problem is that they block sites based on content that schools or other authorities dislike, such as sites on AIDS or other health- and sex-related information. The ACLU believes that blocking sites based on content violates your First Amendment rights. It may also prevent you from having access to useful resources and information. If your school is blocking information that you think would be useful to teens, speak up. Try to gather as much support for your position as possible, and then let the school officials know what you think. Tell officials that you want the responsibility to monitor your own use, and if you abuse the trust, then the school can curtail your use privileges.
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