It appears that board members from School District 128 in nearby Lake County, Illinois need to attend remedial education classes in civics. They were apparently fast asleep during their high school class that dealt with the United States Constitution and the First Amendment:

In a move that has drawn national attention to this Lake County school district, the Community High School District 128 board unanimously passed rules changes Monday night that will hold students accountable for what they post on blogs and social-networking Web sites.

For Libertyville and Vernon Hills High Schools, the changes will mean that all students participating in extracurricular activities, including athletic teams, fine arts groups and school clubs, will have to sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of “illegal or inappropriate” behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

[snip]

Associate Supt. Prentiss Lea said the changes are part of an effort to get the district community more knowledgeable about the growing Internet blog phenomenon and more aware of the pitfalls of such sites as MySpace.com.

“By adding the blog sites [to the student codes of conduct], we wanted to raise discussions on the issue,” he said. “We have taken the first steps to starting that conversation.”

What would constitute “illegal or inappropriate” blog behavior?

In the pledge, which both students and their parents must sign, the students agree that they won’t use alcohol, tobacco or drugs or “exhibit gross misconduct or behavior/citizenship that is considered detrimental to his/her team or school.”

The code of conduct states that “maintaining or being identified on a blog site which depicts illegal or inappropriate behavior will be considered a violation of this code.”

Now if I were the suspicious sort, I’d take the preceding to mean that if I start calling my American Lit teacher a “slut” or my biology teacher “a prick” (or, heaven forbid, refer to the school board itself as “a bunch of dried up old peacocks”) on my blog, anyone who doesn’t much like it can report me to the Blog Police and I can be disciplined for it.

Tom Paine, call you office.

You might think that parents would be up in arms over this violation of their rights to raise their children the way they see fit. After all, if one assumes that the student is writing for the blog off campus and not during school hours, one could ask what in the wide, wide, world of sports are school authorities doing by making it their business to monitor what students do on their own time?

The answer is that only one parent saw fit to stand up for their rights and the rights of their children:

Lake Bluff resident Mary Greenberg, the only person to speak during the public comment period, told officials that the district is overstepping its bounds.

As parents, “we have to watch what they’re doing,” said Greenberg, who has a son at Libertyville High. “I don’t think they need to police what students are doing online. That’s my job.”

Indeed, I can just see my high school trying to do something like this when I was a kid. My mother, God bless her, would have marched into Father Render’s office and told him (in a very nice way, he being a priest and all and my mother a devout Catholic) to stuff it someplace where the sun don’t shine, that she and my father were perfectly capable of “policing” what their children did and that they didn’t need any help from a bunch of busybodies.

And I can also guess the reaction from me and my classmates to this free speech challenge; a massive outbreak of blogs. We would have made sure that every kid in school had a blog and was posting the most outrageous stuff we could find. Not dirty or nasty content, but I can guarantee we would have skewered every teacher, every administrator, and every board member within earshot over this clear intrusion into the private life of students.

As a matter of fact, some of my classmates had a brush with something similar when I was a senior. I was peripherally involved in the publication of a mimeographed “underground” newspaper that was written off campus after school hours but was extraordinarily revolutionary. Some of the things we advocated shook the school to its foundations:

1. Allow for the length of a students hair to touch the collar of the shirt.
2. Elimination of the requirement to wear ties.
3. An end to corporal punishment
4. Allow on-campus smoking
5. Bring anti-war speakers in as guest lecturers

We also took the opportunity to portray some teachers and administrators in a most unflattering light. Not going into details, about all I’ll say is that with a school full of priests and brothers, the sexual innuendo directed at some teachers was something you wouldn’t see in the student newspaper for which most of us wrote.

The “newspaper” had a short run indeed – but not because the school authorities did anything about it. Rather, as typical teenagers, we realized the time we spent trying to come up with inventive ways to insult our teachers could be better spent chasing after typical teenage girls (who were mightily impressed with our efforts to “speak truth to power” let me tell you).

This is so clearly an invasion of privacy that I wonder why the outcry against it hasn’t been more vigorous. I guess it’s just one more sign that parents today may be more willing to let outsiders help raise their kids than our parents were when we were that age.

Maybe it does take a village…

UPDATE

Now another school board is ready to expel a high school student who posted his on line criticisms on a blog:

The student was suspended from school earlier this month after posting a letter online criticizing the discipline of another student, Buck said. He also posted a letter to school administrators saying his opinions were being stifled and that he was being bullied into removing information on his blog.

While he was suspended, the student’s parents received a letter saying the school district is considering expelling him, Buck said.

Is there another side to this story. Well…sorta:

In a written statement, officials said they don’t monitor student Web sites or look up postings unless they create a disturbance at school.

“The district respects the 1st Amendment rights of our students, but not all words can be categorized as protected speech.”

In other words:

You’re free to speak your mind, my friend
As long as you agree with me
Don’t criticize the fatherland
Or those who shape your destiny ’
Cause if you do,
You’ll lose your job,
your mind and all the friends you knew.
We’ll send out all our Boys in Blue.
They’ll find a way to silence you.”

John Kay, call your office.