It's easy to breathe a sigh of relief at a judge's decision to keep a Huntsville kid whose social media posting unnerved a school district from returning to school this fall.
Well, easy for everyone but the kid and his family.
What’s the point?
School officials in Huntsville have little choice but to remove a student who posts on social media a photo easily interpreted as threatening.
The boy was expelled from Huntsville High School for a year on
March 5 after he posted a photo to the social media service Instagram. In that photo, he's wearing a trench coat and holding a rifle not unlike that used in multiple mass shootings in recent years. That his posting came 10 days after 17 people died in gun violence at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School certainly does little to help his cause.
And what's his cause? To return to school for his senior year. To join his fellow runners in cross-country practice, which he had hoped might be a path to college scholarships. To get past the fallout from his decision to post such a threatening image when the entire nation's nerves were frayed by the school violence in Florida. To keep working on what his attorney said was his 3.8 grade-point average.
His mother sued the district. Who can blame her? Moms ought to fight for what they believe to be the best outcome for their children. But, at least in terms of a requested preliminary injunction to prevent the school district from enforcing its expulsion, the judge wasn't ready to ignore the problems the boy's posting created.
The Huntsville student handbook states that students can't use coercion, threat, intimidation or fear, among other things, to "intentionally" disrupt any school mission, process or function. It also says disciplinary action may be imposed "for off-campus conduct occurring at any time that would have a detrimental impact on school discipline, the educational environment or the welfare of the students and/or staff."
The lawsuit asserts the policies are unconstitutionally vague and overly broad. But what are Huntsville administrators supposed to do? Just brush it of as boys being boys?
Context matters in life. How is a school district supposed to react to a photo like that in the wake of a school shooting? Wait for it to happen at Huntsville High? Should they wait for some injured kid to show up on the evening news saying "Yeah, the shooter posted a photo of himself with a gun and trench coat last year but the school district didn't do anything about it?"
Only the kid knows what was in his mind when he posted the image. But school officials can hardly take their responsibility to protect all students seriously if they just ignore concerns. Surely the parents of other students don't want administrators to take chances.
What a powerful lesson for young people (and their elders) about the power of social media and how, once a meme or photo or comment is launched into the vast space of the Internet, it's impossible to maintain control of how people react to it.
Commentary on 08/13/2018