Last Updated on June 13, 2017
Students, be careful what you post on Twitter:   an Indiana high school expelled one of its students over a profanity-filled tweet.
But there’s an odd twist to this story:   the teen says he tweeted the message from his home at 2:30 in the morning to his own personal Twitter account, but the school is maintaining its punishment.   Here’s what he posted, with expletives deleted:
“F*** is one of those F****** words you can F****** put anywhere in a F****** sentence and it still F****** makes sense.”
The school’s principal claims that no matter where and when the tweet is sent, the school may track what its students do on their social media accounts.   (I call this “over the top.”)   The principal also says that the school’s “watchdog software” might have scanned the tweet.   (I call this “Big Brother.”)
The principal also says that the offending tweet still has the school’s IP address.   (This little detail I call “suspicious.”)
Unless the teen’s home has the same IP address as his school, then there’s no way that the IP address should show as originating from the school, particularly not at 2:30 in the morning.   On the other hand, if the tweet originated at the school’s IP address, it may be that the student scheduled the tweet from school to post a time when he couldn’t have been at school.
If he’s clever enough to do that, he’s clever enough to stay in the classroom and use that brain for his own good.
If he can prove that he tweeted from home, and for the sake of argument, let’s say that he did, the school shouldn’t have any business expelling him for a profane tweet.   Sure, it was a silly, juvenile thing to post, but expulsion from school?   That’s absurd.
At least, that’s my take.
Your Turn:
What if you were the teen’s parent?   How would you handle this?
If my daughter had sent this tweet, we would sit down and have a nice long talk. I would want to find out what she was trying to accomplish by sending the tweet. Was she looking to get attention, or try out a new word she learned. There’s something fishy in the story about the school getting the IP, and I would certainly want to know how the school got the information. That said, my daughter’s activity on our home computer is tracked, and she’s required to give us her passwords to things like email, and we tell her straight… Read more »
First of all, my kid would be doing serious time for me for several weeks as discipline for this. Secondly, I would totally be in the principal’s face about seeing proof this IP address business. Third of all, I would be trying really hard not to laugh my effin as… er, donkey, off the whole time.It’s just a WORD! And he used it exactly right in his tweet, each and every time. Has that principal spent any time on the football field with the high school team or coaches, or the locker room after a basketball game??
 @psalm23 I have to agree with you.  It’s not that I approve of use of this word by teens but it isn’t like they haven’t all heard/used it before, either. They aren’t infants, after all.