Senator mulls new legislation after incident
Threatening tweets target York High teachers
YORK, Maine — A state lawmaker may file legislation to protect teachers from students’ cyber threats, following a recent spate of “completely inappropriate” tweets by York High School students directed at their teachers.
Ten students and their parents were called to the school to talk with administrators, and the students apologized to the teachers. Their Twitter accounts have since been deactivated and they were warned a second infraction would lead to disciplinary action.
Teachers union officials said they are satisfied with the action taken.
School administrators said, in deciding on how to act, they had to balance the First Amendment rights of students with the concern of teachers who were the subject of the derisive comments.
Just before school vacation in April, school administrators became aware that 10 students had used their Twitter accounts to tweet derogatory statements about teachers. These included tweets “that were sexual in nature, and one involved an act of violence against a teacher,” said Jeff Barry, president of the York Education Association.
York High School Principal Robert Stevens said the student who made the threatening tweet was an immature freshman who threatened to stab a teacher in the neck. However, “he had no intention of following through with anything. It was a loose remark. It was kids’ language.”
Police were not called in to investigate. According to York police detective Thomas Cryan, a criminal threatening charge can be brought only “when there’s a credible as well as imminent threat associated with it.”
“I probably have threats made against me every hour, especially on court days,” but they don’t rise to criminal threatening, he said.
Barry said, when the tweets were first discovered, “it set off quite a storm. But the administration took the bull by the horns immediately.”
Half of the 10 students were freshmen and none were seniors.
“So there’s a maturity factor here,” Stevens said. “I don’t believe those kids thought for a second that they would be in a school-regulated conversation.”
Some of the tweets were sent during school hours and some were posted when students were at home. That makes a difference, Barry and Stevens said.
The school has both a bullying policy and a technology policy that prohibit students from using any electronic device during school hours.
According to a report subsequently written by school attorneys, tweets sent during school hours allow administrators to act in accordance with the policies. However, if the comments were made on personal computers at home, “we learned there’s not a whole lot we can do about it, unless you can prove that they have created a material and substantive disruption. A teacher being upset is not a substantive disruption.”
Unfortunately, said Stevens, many students don’t have a clue that tweets are out there for the public to see. The students involved “were naive enough to believe that their conversations are private. Until something happens like this, they don’t get it.”
State Sen. Dawn Hill, D-York, said she’s upset about the tweets, after having received several e-mails about them, and wants to look further into possible legislation to protect teachers. There is currently a bullying bill before the Appropriations Committee that might be amendable, she said.
If not, she added, “maybe we need to look at broader language. There’s very little law on this social media. There’s a big learning curve here, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a moral sense of right or wrong.”
Further, she said, students are oblivious to the fact that tweets and other social media posts can come back to haunt them when it’s time to apply for college enrollment and jobs.
Barry said the affected teachers are satisfied with the approach taken by administrators. He said he invited those directly involved to file a grievance, and all said they would let it go for now.
“But I don’t want to say they were OK with it,” he said. “They were definitely rattled.”