Assistant principal files civil suit against students over fake myspace profile
Anna Draker, an assistant principal at Clark High School in Bexar County, Texas, has filed a civil lawsuit against two students and their parents, claiming defamation, libel, negligence and negligent supervision over a page on the popular website MySpace.com. The students, Benjamin Schreiber and Ryan Todd, created a MySpace personal profile that appeared to have been posted by Ms. Draker herself and contained lewd, defamatory, and obscene comments, pictures, and graphics. Benjamin also is facing criminal felony charges. According to Ms. Draker's attorney, Murphy Klasing, she learned of the web page’s existence in April 2006 after it had been up for about a month. "By that point, she had no idea how many people in the world had seen it," says Mr. Klasing. "We do know it had been seen by numerous individuals, including many students at Clark." After Northside Independent School District (NISD) officials were notified, they investigated the incident and suspended Benjamin for three days. Ryan had to attend a parent conference. Northside's police department also investigated and forwarded their findings to the district attorney.
NISD spokesman Pascual Gonzalez points out schools have little control over what students do on off-campus computers. "It's a new era for us dealing with outside Internet activity by kids," says Mr. Gonzalez. "There is no school policy that governs it." Mr. Klasing says that aside from seeking monetary damages for emotional distress, mental anguish, lost wages, and court costs, the point of the suit is to hold the students accountable. "This is the most serious, most concerted effort that I've seen a teacher or a school administrator undertake involving a posting on MySpace," says Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago and author of CyberSociety. While Mr. Jones acknowledges that students have been ridiculing teachers and administrators for generations, they now have a powerful new venue. "These technologies are incredibly public and the potential for harm is much greater simply because these comments and criticisms are being disseminated potentially around the world," he says. "It's an issue of scale that's particularly difficult to contend with."
San Antonio Express-News
By Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
[Link to full story]
[Editor’s Note: The legal complaint in the case is below. For information on some other school district issues with MySpace, see the second link below. The U.S. Senate is considering a bill, H.R. 5319, known as the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which would require schools and libraries to block access to social networking sites like MySpace as a condition of receiving federal E-Rate funds. NSBA has sent a letter to the Senate, below, opposing the legislation. Among other things, the letter argues that the proposal could unintentionally make children more vulnerable, stifle some innovative teaching methods, and impose yet another federal unfunded mandate on school districts, without addressing the key issue of preparing children for safe and responsible Internet use. The posting on NSBA’s daily blog, BoardBuzz, details an effort by MySpace, Seventeen Magazine, and NSBA to help address safety concerns by developing a School Administrators' Guide to Internet Safety. It also includes a link to the existing MySpace Safety Tips for Parents.]
[Complaint in Draker v. Schreiber et al.]
[NSBA School Law pages on MySpace legal issues]
[NSBA letter opposing DOPA]
[BoardBuzz on MySpace safety efforts]