Thursday, we checked in on the case of Avery Doninger, the former Connecticut high school student who was barred from seeking reelection to her student council seat after calling school administrators “douchebags” in a LiveJournal post. As we noted, a federal court has ruled that, given the fuzzy state of the law concerning the scope of school authority over online student speech, Doninger can’t press her First Amendment claim for damages against those who punished her. She plans to appeal that decision, but one state legislator has already declared his intention to introduce a bill establishing separation of blog and state.
According to the Journal-Inquirer, a local paper, former high school teacher Gary LeBeau, who sits on the state’s General Assembly, will seek to create a “bright line” between speech produced on school computers or sent over school networks—which falls within the school’s disciplinary purview—and private speech merely concerning the school. The court had found such a line lacking because “[o]ff-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse.”
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