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While searching the Angelo State library, I came across this 2012 peer reviewed journal article, entitled, "Social Media and Free Speech in Education and Sport", by Jim Bemiller and Sylvia Trendafilova.  In this article, the authors discuss the court case  J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, in which an eighth grade student sued the school district for violating her freedom of speech rights after she was suspended by the school for one week for making false accusations about her principal by creating a fake Myspace page with his picture on the profile (Bemiller & Trendafilova, 2012.

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social media article angleo state library.pdf

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After performing an internet search on the topic of social media and freedom of speech in education, I happened upon the 2014 legal brief, "Disciplining Students for Off-Campus Conduct", by David Rubin.  In this brief, the author discusses past ethical issues concerning off-campus conduct by students and the need for legislature to create guidelines that align with the values of local communities (Rubin, 2014).

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AASA | American Association of School Administrators

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My professional perspective is to eventually work as a high school counselor in a public school system.  I will receive my master's degree in guidance and counseling in July of 2018.  I am currently an Algebra I collaborative teacher at Warren High School in San Antonio, TX.

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Harper (2018) notes in her brief about teaching students about sexual harassment that most health and sex education programs do not teach the need for consent in sexual relationships or what a healthy teen relationship looks like. With a current wave of sexual harassment allegations and the #MeToo movement, advocates are pushing for state legislatures to educate students in order to prevent sexual harassment from occurring (Harper, 2018).

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Dive Brief:

The topics of healthy teen relationships and the need for consent in sexual relationships is missing from most sexual education and heath programs at just the time when such information is most needed, Education Week reports.

Middle school and high school is the time when most ideas about male-female relationships crystallize, but in the absence of proper instruction, many students come to harmful conclusions; yet most states don't require that these topics be discussed.

The current wave of sexual harassment allegations and the #MeToo movement has brought this issue to light, and advocates are trying to help schools and state legislatures understand the school's potential in helping students "recognize what harassment looks like, how to stop it from happening, and how to avoid becoming perpetrators."

Dive Insight:

In 2016, a school district in North Carolina was sued because of its response to an incident that occurred on a field trip to Washington, DC. During the trip, a girl was reportedly sexually assaulted by her fellow students after denying consent, while another student, the son of a school resource officer, filmed the event and later shared it on Snapchat.

Such nightmare scenarios are not uncommon, but they are underreported - especially since data collection under the Clery Act is not required for high schools. However, according to a 2015 U.S. News article, CDC data reveals that 30 % of female rape victims were first raped between the ages of 11 to 17, while Justice Department statistics show close to 20% of girls between the ages of 14 and 17 have been victims. Additionally, the article notes a 1990 study showing that a quarter of girls and a sixth of boys will be sexually abused by age 18.

Another study revealed that "1 in 5 high school women and 1 in 10 high school men reported experiencing dating violence." Many of these sexual assaults are committed by minors, with almost 2,200 minors charged with rape each year and another 9,200 charged with other sex offenses.

Clearly, there is a need for a broader discussion in schools of healthy relationships, sexual harassment, and the legal, ethical and moral aspects of sexual engagement. Fortunately, there are some options for teaching these concepts. The Center for Healthy Teen Relationships, a project of the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence, created a helpful curriculum review resource to help schools select an approach to prevent, intervene and respond to issues involving adolescent dating abuse, sexual assault and stalking. Discovery Education also offers free lesson plans on sexual harassment. However, discussion of these issues can also arise naturally these days in discussion of respect for one another, soft skills for the workplace and current events.

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Teaching students about sexual harassment paramount

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The topics of healthy teen relationships and the need for consent in sexual relationships is missing from most sexual education and heath programs at just the time when such information is most needed, Education Week reports.

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After exploring legal and ethical issues related to school counseling, I am especially interested in the ethical topic of students' freedom of speech through social media when off-campus. This topic interests me because, as a teacher, I am in the dark as to what students may be communicating on their electronic devices and there is a potential for their discussion to directly or indirectly impact other students or school staff in a negative way.

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According to an article brief by Jacobson (2017), a Pennsylvania high school cut a student from the Junior Varsity Cheerleading team because she used profanity on a social media post.  A federal court ruled that the school was out of line because the student's post did not create a "'substantial material disruption to school activities'" (Jacobson, 2017, para. 2).

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Dive Brief:

A federal court has issued a preliminary ruling that a Pennsylvania high school was out of line when it cut a student from the junior varsity cheerleading team for swearing in a weekend social media post, Public News Service reports.

Molly Tack-Hooper, an attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, says the court's message is that schools don't have the authority to discipline students for what they post on their own time, as long as the posts don't create "substantial material disruption to school activities."

The school could still appeal the ruling, the article says.

Dive Insight:

As more student behavior occurs in a virtual space, school administrators don't always have clear direction over what they can and can't police. This piece from the National Coalition Against Censorship suggests that school leaders are often walking a fine line between not interfering with students' First Amendment rights and trying to keep what students post or tweet from disrupting what happens during the school day.

According to the Student Press Law Center, there has been no definitive guidance from the courts on these issues. "Despite the proliferation of student speech on social media and elsewhere online, the federal circuits and state courts remain divided over the level of First Amendment protection that should be accorded to such speech, created by students in their personal time in their homes or elsewhere outside of school," attorney Carolyn Schurr Levin writes. " Whether tweets, Facebook posts and blogs are fully protected by the First Amendment, or whether schools can punish students for such speech, when done off campus, is a question that the United State Supreme Court will ultimately have to settle."

The Pennsylvania case also raises the issue of off-campus behavior in general. While schools want the students who play on their sports teams and represent their schools in the community to be role models, courts have also ruled that school officials can't punish students for breaking the law off-campus. In New Jersey, a student and her family challenged the Ramapo Indian Hills Regional High School District's policy requiring students involved in extracurricular activities, such as sports and clubs, to sign an agreement saying that they wouldn't use drugs or drink even at off-campus events or over the weekend. In this case, a state appeals court ruled that the district had not made a direct connection between students' off-campus behavior and school operations.

In this piece for AASA, education law attorney David Rubin writes that these cases often come down to people's beliefs over whether schools should simply teach academics or whether they should be more involved in the many facets of students' lives.

"How much schools should 'own' off-campus behavior must be considered against the backdrop of this larger debate, and school administrators, as stakeholders in this discussion, should press state legislatures and regulatory agencies to adopt guidelines that reflect the value judgments of the local community," he writes.

Top image credit: Getty Images

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Court rules school out of line in disciplining social media post

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A federal court has issued a preliminary ruling that a Pennsylvania high school was out of line when it cut a student from the junior varsity cheerleading team for swearing in a weekend social media post, Public News Service reports.

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I discussed with Mr. Jaime Collazo, lead counselor at Construction Careers Academy, the various legal and ethical issues that he is faced with each day in his profession and how those issues impact his work and the people around him.  I learned about five important legal and ethical issues during our discussion.

#1: When dealing with female students who may be or are pregnant, there are proper guidelines to follow under the Ethical Standards for School Counselors A2: Confidentiality.  If the student is pregnant or thinks she is, it makes it difficult for a school counselor to decide whether or not to breach the confidentiality agreement.  Jaime Collazo states that, for him, if students are engaged in unsafe sex or if there is over a two year age difference, he will get the parents involved and have to break confidentiality.

#2: School financing and allocation of charter schools poses a challenge for school counselors because students are affected academically, emotionally, and socially.  Because charter schools receive public funding, there is a lack of funding for public schools.    With a lack of funding in public education, there is a lack of funds to employ more teachers or build more classrooms.  This dilemma results in larger class sizes for public schools.  These larger class sizes can cause students to receive less academic attention.  Additionally, some students leave a public school to attend a charter school but then re-enroll in a public school.  By doing this, the student falls behind academically, which becomes stressful for the student.  This added stress affects the student's emotional and social well-being.

#3: According to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the student has the right to confidentiality, unless a student is hurting himself or herself or in imminent danger.  At this point, the counselor must notify the parent.  Based on the Northside Independent School District's board policy, the counselor only has to talk to one parent. This policy can cause stress for the school counselor when dealing with parents who were not informed.

#4:  One ethical issue that Collazo shared with me involved a case in which three children were referred to Child Protective Services (CPS).  According to Collazo, the three children were taken away from their mother because of the horrible things that the mother was doing to them and around them.  The children were placed with their grandmother and received therapy during this time.  The oldest child, however, wanted to go back to live with her mother.  In confidentiality, she even made accusations to Collazo about the grandmother kicking her and beating her.  Collazo noticed that the grandmother was frail and only 82 lbs. at the time, and concluded that ethically, this was not possible.  As a result, he broke confidentiality to keep the oldest child out of harms way from the mother and told CPS of these accusations.

#5:  Divorced parents also pose a challenge for school counselors because they will make false accusations about the other.  Collazo says that if a parent tries to present him with a court decree, he makes sure that it is signed by a judge.  According to law, if the court decree is signed by a lawyer or another party, it means nothing.

(J. Collazo, personal communication, June 8, 2018).

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Welcome to CCA! My name is Jaime Collazo and it is my pleasure to be one of the counselors here at Construction Careers Academy. I work with students whose last names begin with A - Z.

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The Ethical Decisions that High School Counselors Must Make Concerning Off-Campus Behavior on Social Media 

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The Ethical Decisions that High School Counselors Must Make Concerning Off-Campus Behavior on Social Media 

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Even though the first amendment gives a student the right to freedom of speech, off-campus behavior on social media that does not create a material disruption to school activities, but that does negatively impact other students in the school, creates a challenge for school counselors and other school personnel.  To combat this ethical dilemma, school counselors can consistently monitor student behavior and look for signs of emotional distress. Once a school counselor identifies a student displaying these types of behaviors, interviewing students to investigate the cause of their emotional distress opens a door for school counselors to learn of possible off-campus behavior on social media. One scenario could be a high school student bullying another student on SnapChat.
If a high school student is mocking another high school student on SnapChat over the weekend, this cyberbullying can cause emotional distress for the student being bullied.  Despite the fact that the child causing the other child's emotional distress is entitled to his or her right to freedom of speech, assuming the posts are not creating a disruption to school activities, the high school counselor is still obligated to provide the victim with services that promote emotional well-being (American School Counselor Association, 2016).  Ethically, the high school counselor must involve administration and go through the proper channels to discipline the perpetrator's actions.  On the other hand,  the high school counselor is bound by law to honor the perpetrator's right to freedom of speech according to the first amendment of the United States  Constitution (Benmiller & Trendafilova, 2012).  Based on the 1969 court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, students have a constitutional right to freedom of speech. If the student did not disrupt school activities, the school counselor, nor administration can discipline the child (Rubin, 2014).  Even though the victim is affected emotionally while at school, the high school counselor's hands are tied.  One possible solution to this dilemma is proposed by Rubin (2014) by calling for legislatures to create additional guidelines that allow school communities to uphold their values. Adopting guidelines that allow school personnel to discipline or notify parents of any off-campus behavior that affects a student emotionally when at school would be beneficial to any school counselor.

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American School Counselor
Association. (2016). ASCA
ethical standards for school
counselors. Retrieved from https://www.schoolcounselor.org/asca/media/asca/home/SCCompetencies.pdf
Bemiller, J. & Trendafilova, S.
(2012). Social media and free
speech in education and sport.         Journal of Physical Education,
Recreation, and Dance, 83(1),
7-56.
Harper, A. (2018, January).
Teaching students about sexual
harassment paramount. In
Education Dive.  Retrieved from https://www.educationdive.com/news/teaching-students-about-sexual-harassment-paramount/515994/
Jacobson, L. (2017, October).
Court rules school out of line in
disciplining social media post.
Retrieved from https://www.educationdive.com/news/court-rules-school-out-of-line-in-disciplining-social-media-post/507054/
Rubin, D. (2014, January). School
administrator: Disciplining
students for off-campus
behavior. Retrieved from http://www.aasa.org/content.aspx?id=31274