What is the reach of a school when it comes to taking disciplinary action against students?
Public schools may discipline pupils for their online speech spoken off-campus, a federal appeals court ruled Monday in two long-running cases testing student speech in the online world.
However, in the cases decided Monday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Pennsylvania school districts overreacted and breached the First Amendment rights of two students by disciplining them for mocking their principals online, using computers that were off campus.
This Wired article reviews recent decisions on the extent to which a school can react to student online behavior outside of school.