The following MSNBC news video originally aired on the NBC Nightly News. It appeared on the December 30, 2012 broadcast. It deals with high school student Courtni Webb, free speech, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut.
Courtni has been suspended from Life Learning Academy, a charter high school in Treasure Island, which is the San Francisco, California area.
School administrators deemed her poem to be a threat. I didn’t see any direct threat in the poem. At most, one might argue that there was some kind of veiled threat. But Courtni Webb says she was just expressing herself and the fact that she could “understand” why something like Sandy Hook would happen. She says she does not agree with it.
In the end, it appears that Webb’s Sandy Hook poem does not contain a threat. If it really did, then why wasn’t she arrested by the police? If Life Learning Academy really thought it was a threat, wouldn’t calling the police be the proper action instead of suspending her.
At the same time, though, put yourself in the shoes of school administrators. If you say nothing and something bad happens, people will complain that you ignored the warning signs. They would point straight to this poem and say that it was a threat of violence.
In the end, I’m not sure there’s much that can be done about this if you are Courtni Webb. There is a constitutional scholar in the story that says her rights of free speech cover this type of poem. In the future, though, it seems best to just keep this kind of poetry at home instead of in the classroom. Legally, there was no criminal threat in this poem. But schools would not be doing their duty if they didn’t act upon this kind of skirting-the-line literature. Perhaps a suspension was an excessive response, though.
To students that want to express themselves and are not violent, keep in mind you can do this outside the school all day long. For those who are violent, I guess we have to hope they do share this stuff at school so people will have warning signs.
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