Online, offline student 'melee'

A St. Louis-area school board this week voted unanimously to expel 12 students – 11 girls and one boy - involved in an in-school fight over who did or didn't get invited to a party. Three of the students will be excluded from graduation next spring. The superintendent said "the board had little choice but to expel the students because school administrators had tried to mediate differences between the two student factions before the melee," the Associated Press reports. "Madison County prosecutors already had charged three of the students - all 18 or 17 years old - with felony mob action in the fight, which produced no serious injuries." The fight reportedly was planned by the students via messages and bulletins in MySpace, just two days after "parents of seven of the students accompanied their children to school [of 2,500 students] to sign nonaggression pacts." Besides being one of the planners' communications channels, MySpace probably also played a role in identifying the fight planners, because it works closely with law enforcement and, more recently, schools. In September, with the help of the National School Boards Association and Seventeen magazine, MySpace began distributing online safety brochures to some 55,000 schools nationwide (see this 9/29 item). Not only is the line between students' online and offline lives going away, so is the line between what happens on and off school grounds, putting schools in quite a quandary. For a bit of case-law history on students' and schools' rights, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's FAQ on student blogging.