Student government events are very selective and hard to get into. Which means that this girl's presence was at the expense of many of her classmates who couldn't go.
School functions always have a "code of conduct" attached. Students are expected to be respectful and appropriate. They don't have to agree, but they do have to disagree in a respectful and appropriate manner (are we not trying to inculcate maturity in schools?).
This girl tweeted that she told a member of government that he "sucked" to his face at this school-sponsored event. Now, I don't know how many of you think "You suck!" is a respectful and appropriate form of disapproval (but if so, please go back to watching the Jersey Shore and sucking off the government teat... the rest of this discussion is for the adults in the room).
The girl was rightly called on the carpet for her manner of speaking. The student should not have expressed her disapproval in a manner that would put her and her fellow students in a bad light (would you be defending her if she flicked him off and urinated on his foot, too?), and she certainly should not have published that fact in order to draw attention to it.
This has nothing to do with her opinion, and everything to with her choice to voice her opinion in a rude way during a forum where her participation was a privilege in the first place.
What was your opinion of a congressman shouting out “You lie!” during a recent State of the Union address?
THANK YOU! That is why I posted the article. I’m focusing on the behavior and actions of this girl and how few are mentioning it on the websites I’ve visited. I would have been in so much trouble had I done this. It would have appalled and disappointed my parents if I used such language and acted in such a disrespectful way toward an adult.
If this was a private school or homeschool I would absolutely agree with you. However....You are missing the fundamental problem and conflict here.
Problem and conflict:
It is impossible to resolve the conflict between First Amendment Rights and freedom of conscience and compulsory socialist K-12 schooling. Our nation's government schools trash every First Amendment Right ( speech, press, assembly, and exercise of religion) and they are not religiously neutral. At the moment our socialist schools establish the religion of atheistic secular humanism.
There is a solution: Begin the process of privatizing K-12 schooling. Let these matters be settled privately in a private setting between parents and their child's privately chosen private teachers and principal.
If this were a private school, there would be no story to report because private schools ( freely chosen) have every right to regulate behavior of their clients in the same way that all private businesses do.
We agree about code of conduct and the purpose of a school system to inculcate a sense of civic responsibility upon it’s students.
However,
1. She did not say anything even remotely threatening or illegal.
2. She did not interfere nor disrupt with the event.
3. The school administrators can NOT censor purely political speech in what amounts to a private conversatoin held in public between two individuals that is neither threatening nor disruptive, especially when one is a public elected official.
4. If she had wrote a sign and waved it with the same words on it, it would have been a problem. However, the online twitter post is offsite, which means the school is hanging on to a very thin thread of in loco parentis standing to do anything to the young woman in regards to punishment.
5. If the school didn’t have a specific policy prohibiting students from using cell phones on school time, school grounds, and/or during field trips, the school has no standing.
A couple of letters from her parent’s lawyers and she’ll get a written apology from the school board.
If her parents are liberals, and she learned this socio-political ideology at home, it is her 1st Amendment Right to act like an idiot in public, no matter the school system code of conduct.
Or should schools return to late 19th century’s ‘conformity at all costs’ philosophies?
Or should school systems pick winners and losers of extra curricula educational opportunities based upon the political party preferences of the parents, student, or school system?
In NJ, it is SOP to deny extra-curricula funding to school systems in areas that did not vote for election winners. How far should Brownback’s media massagers go in raising stakes in this tiff?