This article in District Administration was too good to pass up.
While investigating a tip that a student had a picture of another, partially nude, female student on his cell phone, Ting-Yei Oei, assistant principal at Freedom High School in Loudoun County, Va., asked the student to e-mail the picture to his own cell phone.
LMAO! This reminds me of a federal child porn appeal I sat in on where the judge wanted to see the single picture for which the woman defendant had been prosecuted. The attorney for he state refused to send it to him for fear she would herself then be in violation of the child porn laws. The content of the picture really wasn’t at issue in the appeal. The attorney apparently drove the picture back up to Pasadena from San Diego to show the judge rather than send it through the mail.
The sexting article goes on to discuss how schools should best handle sexting cases, with a slant toward not getting involved unless the behavior becomes disruptive or the sexting involves use of school computers. Certainly, students should have an assumption of privacy when communicating with their own personal cell phone and even, to some extent, when using school computers. The school doesn’t have the right to listen in on a student’s phone call if they are using a pay phone on campus, so it shouldn’t feel automatically entitled to horn in on communications using school computers.
In essence, if a student decides to send a nude picture of themselves to a friend using their personal phone, it’s none of the schools business unless the act of sending that message negatively affects the school in some clearly identifiable way. Not every activity, even on campus, automatically demands regulations and rules.
