What happens when a student's or teacher's freedom of expression apparently conflicts with or seems to challenge the school's mission to teach students in an orderly way? The following Web sites explore longstanding and emerging legal issues facing schools, especially those revolving around the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects free speech, a free press, and the practice of religion.
The First Amendment
The Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center (www.freedomforum.org/first) offers commentary, news, and resources to promote understanding the implications of the First Amendment in schools. For lesson ideas, go to the "First Amendment Center" and download such publications as Religion in American History: What To Teach and How or Finding Common Ground: A First Amendment Guide to Religion and Public Education, both authored by the center's senior scholar, Charles Haynes.
The Student Press Law Center's (www.splc.org) mission is to teach student journalists about "the rights and responsibilities embodied in the First Amendment." The Center offers free legal advice to student journalists and maintains a network of local attorneys who provide pro bono legal representation for students.
See the Center's Legal Clinic for help on the legal issues most often brought up by high school and college journalists, model guidelines on freedom of expression and free speech for public and private high school media, and legal tips for students who publish underground newspapers or independent Web sites featuring school topics.
Keeping Schools Safe
Meet Sybil Liberty, the cartoon "resident expert" for students' rights at the American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org/issues/student/hmes.html). Sybil provides information about such school issues as due process for students threatened with suspension, the right to religious freedom, and access to students' personal records.
To find out whether banning gang insignia is inhibiting a student's freedom of expression, check out the U.S. Department of Education's Manual on School Uniforms (www.ed.gov/updates/uniforms.html), which offers guidelines on creating dress codes—including "opt out" provisions and support for disadvantaged students.
Bullies beware—the ERIC Clearinghouse on Counseling and Student Services (http://ericcass.uncg.edu/virtuallib/bullying/bullyingbook.html) marshals a variety of national and international research on juvenile bullying and prevention.
Separate and Unequal
The Merrow Report, an ongoing education series on public TV and radio, has examined the resegregation of U.S. schools (www.pbs.org/merrow/tmr_radio/pgm16/index.html; scroll down to Part 3). Download host John Merrow's interview with Gary Orfield of Harvard's Civil Rights Project and read articles about how resegregation has emerged as an issue in U.S. schools, especially for Latino students.
Then read Orfield's report, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation, at the Civil Rights Project Web site (www.law.harvard.edu/civilrights/publications/schoolsseparate.pdf). The Civil Rights Project focuses on racial inequities. Its study of zero tolerance policies that schools imposed in the wake of highly publicized school shootings shows that the flight of common sense in their application has had devastating consequences for not only minority students but also those with special needs (www.law.harvard.edu/groups/civilrights/conferences/zero/zt_report2.html).
Gatekeeping and Copyright
Communities expect safe schools—and that means electronically, too. Safeguarding the Wired Schoolhouse (www.safewiredschools.org), run by the Consortium for School Networking, opposes the federal law, saying that acceptable-use policies should be decided at the local level. The site offers a checklist for school policy decision making on Internet usage, plus related Web sites for school leaders and parents.
As well as deciding what information to keep out of their schools, teachers, librarians, and students need to know what they can copy, whether it's books, music, or digital information. The Copyright Implementation Manual (groton.k12.ct.us/mts/eg1.htm) of the Groton Public Schools in Mystic, Connecticut, serves as a model to help schools traverse the waters of intellectual property and copyright law.
