Catholic expert: Blogs a danger to students

ATLANTA, Ga. - Blogging poses grave safety and legal issues, said Sister Mary Angela Shaughnessy, a Sister of Charity of Nazareth, Ky., who is executive director of the Education Law Institute in Louisville, Ky.

"Two years ago, I don't think I could have told you what blogging is," Sister Mary Angela said during an April 19 workshop at the National Catholic Educational Association's annual convention in Atlanta. "Now, I'm some sort of expert." Blogs, a contraction of the phrase "Web logs," are archives of diarylike postings on individuals' own Web pages. Blogs are often collected on certain Web sites, such as www.myspace.com. High school students, who often create blogs, "don't get it," Sister Mary Angela said. "They don't get that giving their name, their address, their telephone number, the school they go to and the hours they go might get them caught." Despite teens' seeming ignorance of the dangers of blogs, "parents know even less about computers than their kids do," she added. School officials can get their students to remove any school logo from a blog, since it is an unauthorized use of a copyrighted symbol, but a blog, like much else in cyberspace, is "archived forever and you can't cut it off," Sister Mary Angela said. In a talk that covered a wide range of legal issues affecting schools, she also noted some courts are giving new consideration to whether Catholic school students may bring constitutional claims against their schools. One court ruled that a Catholic school could not include any rules in its student handbook that were not "directly related to the mission of the Catholic school." The school ultimately prevailed in an appeal at the state supreme court level, but only after two years and a $150,000 legal bill. Schools "bind themselves" if they say in student handbooks that students have the right to "constitutional due process" if they are alleged to have committed an infraction, Sister Mary Angela said. If they were to say "Christian due process" instead, it would still provide fairness while keeping the school from the possibility of accused students facing their accusers and bringing in lawyers at disciplinary hearings. Schools must also realize that mental supervision of their students is considered at least as important as physical supervision, Sister Mary Angela said. This means, for example, that school staff cannot just be present on a playground at recess; they have to be "engaged" with students even if they'd much rather be talking to another adult for the first time all day, she added. "The courts are giving no quarter on this." Schools can also be held liable if children are injured on a field trip. The situation is made worse if the permission slips are lost. "Suppose something happened and you can't find a permission slip," Sister Mary Angela said. "A parent can say, 'You kidnapped my kid.'" Teachers can be held liable for one student's harassment of another, and demeaning behavior of any kind can be considered harassment, she noted, not just sexual harassment. Courts are adopting an "eggshell plaintiff" theory, Sister Mary Angela said, which has been described as the "defendant takes the victim as found." It protects the rights of individuals whose pre-existing fragility makes them particularly susceptible to injury. "Even if you've got a supersensitive kid, you've got to leave him the way you found him," she said. "We have to start really young on the demeaning behavior business," she added; otherwise "it can end in court, and you don't want to be there."

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