School Response to Cyberbullying and Sexting: The Legal Challenges

The wonderful new interactive communication technologies that are immersing and benefitting our society--are also causing some major headaches for school leaders. Young people are engaging in what is commonly called “cyberbullying,” the use of electronic communication technologies to intentionally engage in repeated or widely disseminated acts of cruelty towards another that results in emotional harm. The newly emerging issue of sexting, sending nude sexy images via cell phone texting, presents ever more challenging concerns. These two concerns clearly overlap. Distributing nude images is one form of cyberbullying. A major challenge for school officials is that many of these interactions are occurring when students post information while they are off-campus or when they are using their personal digital devices while at school, which is hard to detect. But the harmful impact of these interactions is clearly evident at school, because this is where students are physically together. Electronic aggression is clearly a contributing factor in altercations that occur on campus and is creating the conditions where students are do not feel safe coming to school or are unable to effectively focus on their studies. When school officials seek to formally respond, that is impose a disciplinary consequence, in situations that involve student speech, this necessarily raises issues of the extent of their authority and questions of student free speech. Other legal issues also arise in the context of seeking to address these situations, including questions about the extent of district