After the Great Valley social media scandal, we must balance free speech with ‘digital citizenship’

How should schools regulate what students post on the internet?

I don’t know. But here’s what I do know: We’ll never craft good policies around online student speech unless we listen to what students have to say.

That’s been the missing voice in the controversy in Great Valley, a Chester County school district where middle school students made 22 TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers. Some of the fake videos were truly horrible, casting the teachers as pedophiles or depicting them in sexual encounters with each other.

At a packed school board meeting last Monday, angry community members said the board should have taken more punitive action against the offending students. Many people in the audience were teachers, who argued that they should have a stronger role in helping the district make new rules around online behavior.

They’re right, of course. But we also need to engage students in the same deliberations. They’re the people who will be most directly affected by whatever the district decides. Somehow, it needs to protect students’ free speech and also protect them — and their teachers — from the types of vile attacks Great Valley witnessed this spring.

It won’t be easy. Three years ago, in its last major decision on student speech, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Schuylkill County school district could not discipline Brandi Levy, a 14-year-old cheerleader, for posting a string of expletives on Snapchat after she didn’t make her high school team.

Writing for an 8-1 majority, Justice Stephen Breyer declared that students must retain the right to criticize authorities — including, in Levy’s case, athletic coaches. After all, Breyer memorably wrote, schools are “nurseries of democracy.” If we deny students freedom of speech, we’ll be teaching them all the wrong lessons about our system of government.

But that freedom also has limits, Breyer cautioned. Drawing on the language of Tinker v. Des Moines, the landmark 1969 ruling that allowed students to wear anti-war symbols to school, Breyer said that schools could regulate students’ out-of-school speech if it threatened “substantial disruption,” or if it posed an imminent danger to members of the community.

Levy’s vulgar Snapchat post did neither, Breyer wrote. But schools could penalize online behavior involving “serious or severe bullying or harassment targeting particular individuals” or “threats aimed at teachers or other individuals,” he argued.

Under that standard, several parents told the school board meeting last Monday, Great Valley could discipline the students who made the fake videos. I agree. What could be more threatening to a teacher than a video targeting them as a pedophile?

But I also sympathize with the school district, which needs to ensure students retain their right to say what they think — about the school, and everything else. In another case out of Schuylkill County, a federal judge ruled in 2010 that a school district had violated a student’s First Amendment rights when it suspended her for posting a parody profile of her principal on MySpace.

That same year, a Florida judge said a school couldn’t discipline a student for creating a Facebook page devoted to criticizing her least favorite teacher. The page “did not cause any disruption on campus, and was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior,” the judge wrote. “The potential spark of disruption had sputtered out, and all that was left was the opportunity to punish.”

So when is a student’s online activity so disruptive — or so threatening — that a school should punish it? That’s the big question. And we should be asking our students — not just their teachers — to answer it.

That’s a great way to help young people learn about free speech in America. It’s also the best way to establish reasonable systems for regulating it in schools. Our students will have to learn how to think and act in this brave new world of TikTok — and whatever comes next to replace it. We need to hear what they think we should do about it.

Students will have to learn how to think and act in this brave new world of TikTok — and whatever comes next to replace it.

At the school board meeting last Monday in Great Valley, Superintendent Daniel Goffredo pledged to review his district’s policies around student conduct and technology. He also said schools would step up efforts to teach “digital citizenship.”

I hope the first lesson focuses on how schools should monitor online behavior. And at the end of the course, I hope every student in Great Valley is asked to write an essay explaining what the district should have done in response to the fake videos, and what it should do to prevent such incidents going forward.

As one of my own teachers once told me, the best way to teach good citizenship is to give students the chance to govern themselves. Let’s make sure we don’t miss out on that opportunity.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author (with cartoonist Signe Wilkinson) of “Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn” and eight other books.