Principal Cancels Classes, Sues Over MySpace Prank 520
Earnest writes "A prank MySpace page has led to a barrage of lawsuits and the misuse of school resources as the principal targeted by the pranksters attempted to find the perpetrators. In 2005, students at Hickory High School in Pennsylvania created a fake MySpace profile of principal Eric Trosch. As a result, the school's IT staff spent about 25 percent of his work time dealing with the issue and finding the culprits. That's not all. 'Trosch kept at it, even taking measures that led to the "cancellation of computer programming classes as well as usage of computers for research for class projects." Now the basic educational mission of the school was being compromised in order to keep students from visiting these profiles during school hours (students were still free to look at the profiles from home, of course).'"
Why do they have so much power? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too sensitive.... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Mike
Closet freak? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not about MySpace. (Score:5, Insightful)
This issue is about the discipline of students, dealing with a prank in an appropriate manner, and ultimately finding the reason why some people find it funny to be disrespectful to someone (hopefully) dedicated to improving their future. If MySpace, or even the internet itself, vanished overnight it'd still happen as much as it does now.
here's an idea (Score:0, Insightful)
Litigation, Litigation, Litigation (Score:5, Insightful)
Something doo economics. Anyone? Anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice to see that this guy holds the student's education as a high priority. Who needs to be able to search the web for research purposes or to lean how to code?
Re:Too sensitive.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is not about MySpace. (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you kidding me?
People find it funny to be disrespectful to people in power. Why? Because frequently those people use that power badly. They earn that disrespect.
c.f. "President of the United States."
suing his students? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ii wonder if he is going to sue himself next, as he was the one that created the circumstances for this damage. It was not the students actions (some childish prank that was rather unremarkable) but his own ego that led to the damage to his 'earning potential'. Maybe he didn't understand the meaning of the word earn: his egotrip earned him ridicule, which is a just reward for him
Re:Little git (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Damaging *his* earning potential ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is not about MySpace. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah but it takes a "court jester" to pull it off. The real problem (as others have pointed out) would seem to be that the entire staff were seemingly unaware they could selectively block prank sites. The egomaniac should be sacked for gross incompetence and just plain childish behaviour. The rest of the staff should be enrolled in basic computer classes, not left in charge of running them.
Sure the little brats will see it as a victory, right up until they get a new headmaster and loose access to myspace on the same day.
Better approach (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be wiser to monitor the school network to identify the people who where capable to modify the specific webpage. You could make the phrank die out silently, or convert the page to a more friendly nature.
The principal, he has diserved this. Being so immature.
He could have saved a lot of trouble... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is not about MySpace. (Score:0, Insightful)
I love watching people throw around the word "incompetence," because usually what it comes down to is this: "I know about this one particular field, so if someone else doesn't know anything about it, they're incompetent." What they fail to realize is that they themselves are considered "incompetent" in most areas by their very own standards.
Was this guy wrong in doing what he did? Absolutely. I'll agree with you on the "childish behaviour" part, but to say that he was incompetent based on the handling of this one incident just shows where your own maturity level lies.
Man who really gives a crap? (Score:3, Insightful)
People should be abllowed to post anything they want on the Internet. It is not the same as other printed media.
IMO if it isn't markedly obvious that the source is a cooperation or employed by someone, then everything on the Internet should be assumed to be hearsay and thus immune from libel. You know "freedom of speech" and all???
Seriously - what is the difference between a blog posting and sticking a flyter on a telephone pole? Would you give one more credibility than another? If so - WHY?!?!
People need to be made aware than anyone can, and will, make a face MySpace / Facebook / Whatever claiming to be you. That's Just the plain truth. If you have a problem with that then unplug your PC and go back to your telegraph. I have a metric crapload of derogatory things on me out on the web in various locations. Did I go sue every one of them? Of course not. Cause I have a backbone.
There are KIDS. It doesn't matter if the site is taken down or not cause they're making fun of the principal and teachers 24/7 behind their backs anyways, cause it's the fun thing to do. If this guy is really that sensitive to what a 12 year old thinks about him he is in the wrong job.
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is not about MySpace. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a legal matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:suing his students? (Score:3, Insightful)
The remarks about earning potential is something you put in court cases - he's not got much case for a civil suit is he said 'and there was no ill effect on me'.
If you consider it to be an egotrip, consider if you'd like a MySpace page yourself, with details of your own drunken child-fondling activities
Re:Litigation, Litigation, Litigation (Score:2, Insightful)
Discipline by parents? They're too busy to deal with their kids. That's what the TV and internet is for.
Re:Why do they have so much power? (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead they left the site up for all to see and sat there obsessively watching it. The result is that it was more entertaining for the other students and the ones who created the sites get to know just how pissed off they made the administration.
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:5, Insightful)
reminds me of two quotations from mark twain:
Re:I'm sure most posts will be against the princip (Score:3, Insightful)
To quote the great Dennis Miller, "Life is tough, get a helmet."
I agree that this was a juvenile and "typically teenager" thing to do, but this guy is out of his mind by reacting in the way that he is (and has). I mean, come on, "emotionally distraught"?? Geez, who in this world hasn't been the target of some form of ridicule/satire/mockery? Sure he's got a right to be annoyed about it, but dude, they're teenagers, and you're their principal, they're going to hate you and make fun of you, that's probably in the job description.
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bloody dictators (Score:2, Insightful)
The issue isn't that students in general need to learn respect, or libel, or slander, or even free speech.
Rather, the issue here is that too many teachers and principals are little tinpot dictators who view their schools as their fiefdom and students as little serfs answerable to them. It's part of why they become teachers and principals in the first place, a great chunk of them HATE kids but see it as a way to get a piece of their own little world, isolated from the adult world and with a more vulnerable, ignorant populace more fearsome of authority and thus more easily controlled. Oh, plus the summer off.
If there wasn't a way to force respect based on authoritarianism they wouldn't be interested, they're sado-masochists in disguise, mix them in with children and that makes them predators
Year after year there's always something or other frivolous thing they're trying to control. This year, in my neighbourhood, it was them trying to ban Axe body deodorant. I remember when I was a kid they tried to ban Doc Martens. Somewhere in between it was friggin' multi-colored shoe laces. Now it's MySpace. It never ends.
There's always that one teacher or principal who has petty tantrums and throws things around, forcing everyone else to either follow suit or take a stand on an issue when they would rather not. These become role models for the kids and we wind up with assholes like Bush growing up and doing the same thing to whole countries.
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn, this is a biased crowd. (Score:3, Insightful)
Think for a minute what it's like to be a MALE teacher, in an overwhelmingly FEMALE dominated arena. I had two male teachers growing up. One of them was involved in a real sex scandal. The other was an incredibly gifted math and computer science teacher with mediocre social skills. He was a geek, and into computers, and shy
So. You've been in this game long enough to make it up to administrator, and principal. All it takes is a *HINT* of impropriety to get your ass fired by the school board.
So some smartass teenagers make a myspace page about you
What would YOU do? You have a family to support, this is your livelihood.
Not saying everything the guy did was right, but try that shoe on the other foot for a minute. I think I understand where he was coming from.
Re:I'm sure most posts will be against the princip (Score:5, Insightful)
The same could apply to the kids now facing the legal consequences of their actions, no?
Re:I'm sure most posts will be against the princip (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is, back when this rule was put into place, the percentage of reasonable people among the general population was far higher than it is today.
Re:I'm sure most posts will be against the princip (Score:1, Insightful)
These teenagers, as well as most teenagers in general, do not understand and will not consider implications of their actions before doing something stupid.
That's the nature of teenagers. Always has been. See Teenagers fail to see the consequences [newscientist.com].
Purposefully publishing lies in printed form with the willful intent to harm someone's reputation is called slander, and is punishable by law. These kids clearly did exactly that.
If somethiong is so over the top that it is absolutely unbelievable, it's not slander. For instance, if I accuse you of eating human babies, it isn't likely to be slander (or at least I hope not, is there a lawyer in the house?) TFA lists all sorts of sordid things he's supposed to be doing, from molesting children to drugs. Clearly, nobody with an IQ greater than 65 would ever believe this crap.
The principal's daughter was emotionally distraught when she discovered the pages, as well as the principal.
Well, I've been emotionally distraught. Should I sue? That's just childish; even more childish than what the teenagers did. As an earlier poster mentioned, the principal is supposed to be the adult here, and clearly wasn't acting like one.
It's just a prank, and I, too, see where his anger comes from, but adults are supposed to be able to control their anger. I've finally learned personally that anger is almost always counterproductive.
This has, however, hurt his reputatiion; I wouldn't hire him. Not because of the stupid MySpace page, but because of his reaction to it. Most employers want employees with a little maturity, and this dumbass showed none whatsoever.
Were the kids wrong? Sure, but they're kids. The principal has no such excuse.
Re:I'm sure most posts will be against the princip (Score:5, Insightful)
While I think you're over-generalizing a tad (I've met teens that were much smarter than college students so not all teens are idiots), I would dare say it's the principal's job to assist in the education of the teens in his school, including the one who put up the fake MySpace profile. Exactly what type of lesson has he taught them from all of this? That adults act like a bunch of kids fighting on the playground when insulted? That even the principal, the highest authority in their school will act like a total idiot and neglect his job duties to go on a personal vendetta when he discovers his students are insulting him? Sure what the kid did was libel (not slander, slander's spoken), but the principal has completely failed in his duties and provided a perfectly horrible example to ALL of his students, not just the one who put up the fake profile. There's no defending that part, suing over the libel? Sure, not a problem. Diverting school resources to a personal vendetta? Now that's a major problem, and much worse than the libel the kid did because it affected the education of every damn kid in the school.
One thing you failed to mention is that the kid created the libelous profile from home, not from one of the school's computers. The principal used pretty much all of the school's computing resources to go on a personal vendetta against the kids (the one who created the profile plus students posting comments on it). I'd say neither one was considering the implications of their actions ahead of time.
So sue, don't disrupt the entire damn school and fuck up the education of hundreds of kids just because you were "emotionally distraught". We pay teachers, and principals even more so, to deal with this type of stuff and to educate our kids. Also think about what's happened with this thanks to the principal's over reaction. How emotionally distraught do you think his daughter is about his looking like a total ass in front of the entire nation now? What's worse is he can't blame this on libel, people are going to look at his actions and come to their own conclusions, but many are going to think he's acting like a spoiled brat.
You kinda contradict yourself here, how can "the student's work [be] malicious in nature" if he "do[es] not understand and [did] not consider [the] implications of their actions before doing something stupid"? You can't have it both ways, if they didn't understand then it wasn't malicious, if they did understand then it was. In the first case I think an apology would have worked just fine, IF the principal hadn't over reacted and escalated this into a much larger issue than it could have been. Now that he's managed to drag it into the national spotlight I suppose an apology won't cut it, but neither will winning a lawsuit against the student get his reputation back. He's earned a new reputation for himself, one not based on the profile's libelous claims at all, and this reputation isn't beneficial to him either.
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to the brave new world. Bullies have new tools and methods to use to screw with your precious little child. Either you armed your child with the correct tools to deal with the issue or you didn't. Sounds like you didn't. The environment is going to do things to you and your family that are outside your control, you are helpless. If your child doesn't have established coping mechanisms and the iron will self esteem needed to deal with the harsh environment that you are partially responsible for creating, then you failed.
It's never going to go backwards. It's never going to be like the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, or 90's again. Peer pressure has taken a new form and uses new routes to reach your children. Crying "OH MY GOD!, You people don't understand what this is doing!" is beyond unproductive - it's fucking moronic.
Evaluate and counteract, estimate and prepare - get a copy of the Art of War for Christ's sake. Arm your children with the self esteem they need to maneuver through the meat grinder that is school.
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's one thing to prank someone for something that can be removed, but it's quite another to ruin someone's employability. Would you think it's funny if you went job hunting only to find out that someone you knew was calling all your prospective employers behind your back and telling them all about your drinking binges in college and how much pot you used to smoke?
What if they had done it to another student? Would you feel the same way? What if the students posted a fake Myspace profile for your child mentioning that he is homosexual and wants to become transgendered, enjoys copious amounts of Heroin and Steroids and frequently has sex with strangers. Is that such a minor act?
They School System is for the Birds. (Score:5, Insightful)
I barely survived high school exactly because of crazy authority figures. I was never rude, I was never mean-spirited. I simply came to the realization that school was 95% boring, brain-washing busy-work and stopped attending all but one class which I needed in order to graduate and get my 'piece of paper'. I'd already been accepted into the college of my choice, so the whole graduating process was purely a formality. I figured, "Why waste my time going to a bunch of classes I sleep through anyway?"
Many of the teachers didn't even notice. A few of the cool ones said, "Yeah. That makes sense. Good luck!"
A remaining clutch of staff members, however, perceived my actions as a personal attack of the worst sort and made it a top priority to prevent me from graduating. It had nothing to do with rules and everything to do with what they thought of as disrespectful behavior on my part. They thought I was cheating the system, which I suppose I was. (But then, I figured that the system was cheating everybody, so I wasn't about to feel guilty about not jumping through a bunch of silly hoops.)
I remember teachers saying, "But you'll get failing marks!" And I remember saying, "And. . ? Do you really believe I'm going to let a piece of paper stop me from traveling the world and doing all the things I want to do in life? If an employer is unable to see me for who I am without consulting my high school grades, then why on earth would I want to work for such a person? Whatever job they are offering is probably going to be more of the same stuff they pace kids with in high school anyway. No thanks."
"But you'll only ever be able to work as a cashier. As a burger flipper!"
"No. That's only true if you believe it, which I don't. --I spent last Summer working at a cool company which I found simply by walking in off the street to visit. I expressed keen interest in learning about what they did, and they let me hang around and help out. By the end of the Summer, they'd offered me a high-paying full-time position with lots of growth potential. I turned it down so I could come back here and finish my high school off and get my piece of paper. How foolish was that?" (I'd been conned into believing that the school system and its graduating certificates actually meant something. That programming took some time to undo, by which point I was already in the last third of the last year and pulling my hair out.)
Anyway, they were really upset that somebody would dare point out the flaws in the edifice of the 'unquestionable authority' which the school system was supposed to represent, and which they felt children must yield to, kneel before, fear and be willing to jump through hoops for. Instead, I just looked at it and yawned. This made some of the adults in charge fume with rage and indignation. I still don't fully understand why.
My parents were called, legalities were threatened, they tried to make me sign agreements through physical intimidation. It was all very strange. --I remember around the same time, one fellow in a suit who I'd never seen before, actually chased me down the hall, grabbed me by the arm and blustered in my face, "When you are a professional, you will understand that you cannot criticize another professional!" (Or something to that effect.) --I'd made the mistake of reading and laughing at a posted flyer for a course he was apparently in charge of and which I thought was ridiculous. I laughingly explained why I thought so to a friend, and bluster-man happened to be standing right behind me.
Maybe, deep down, such people know that they have ridiculous, frustratingly broken job descriptions and rather than just deal with it honestly or change things, they instead try to
Re:Why do they have so much power? (Score:1, Insightful)
Our four student Pascal class has TRS-80 (Trash-80) machines, while the touch-typing class had PCs. We had to beg the district for a PC Pascal compiler, and produce a team-project to justify it.
If schools do not want computer programming students to use MySpace, then don't connect their computers to the Internet! Keep Internet computers in the library. I learned to program without a networked machine. Why can't they?
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:1, Insightful)
surely this cannot be protected speech- it is slanderous (and quite obviously malicious in intent - does anyone here think there's any chance at all it was "good natured ribbing"?)
We are talking about children who insult and attack authority figures because they "know" nothing can be done about it.
I hope that these children get everything that's coming to them
Re:Moron Principal (Score:3, Insightful)
That would work if they said "He's fat and bald" or made him look like a monkey or something like that, but it sounds like the page labelled him as a pedophile among other things. In this day and age, that's not a laughing matter: he can't start playing along with that: "Oh yeah, I really like to have sex with students, don't tell anyone." The suspicion of pedophilia could be enough to ruin his career and his life.
Yeah, he overreacted big time (and his overreaction probably did more for his earning potential than some little MySpace page), but this prank did cross the line from prank into libel. A serious (though not vengeful or petty) response was required.
It occurs to me: the danger of this site is not so much that the students see it (though the principal's daughter being there complicates matters) but that there be a permanent, public record. Maybe schools could set up a local intranet site, accessible ONLY at school, where students can make fun of their teachers and principal all they want.
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:3, Insightful)
a) not real
b) made by an angry student
c) a common joke against those in the profession
d) all of the above
This is why slander is harder to prove if you're famous. If this guy decided to serve in the public eye, he should be willing to accept that the eye will sometimes draw people who don't like him. The point is, if I find a profile about a congressman on myspace, I don't believe what I read.
This is not the same as a PRINCIPAL doing something to a student. One is a MINOR with no public image, while the other is a public servant (oh, and an adult) with a public image. One is already in the public eye (and paid to be there), one is not.
Re:Remember..when the principal was the adult? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, according to you, this would cause an employer to immediatly assume my resume is a lie.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Of course, if the employer is really that stupid, I'm better off not getting hired.