Student expelled for tweeting F-Word

A Senior at Garrett High School has been expelled after tweeting the F-word to his personal Twitter account via a school computer.

Austin Carroll, a final year student at Garrett High School said that he felt the school violated his rights, because whatever was posted on his personal Twitter account is his “personal business” and that nobody should be snooping around his content.

He tweeted the following: “Fuck is one of the fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and still fucking makes sense.”

While the school says the tweet was posted via a school computer, Austin insisted that it was actually done at home. It turns out that the school has tracking software installed to monitor all social networks used by students. If for instance a student posted content while at home and then later logged in again via a school computer, the software would crawl their accounts for blacklisted keywords and report it.

While the school does accuse him of using a school computer to send the tweet, a back trace shows that it was sent around 2:30am, which definitely confirmed it was done at his home. It seems that because he used a school laptop, it would have appeared to pass through the school network because the system used the school’s network IP address to connect to the Internet.

Austin’s mother and his entire senior class were in uproar about the situation saying that an outright expulsion was too strict a sentence for such a minor offense. Let’s face it, many kids curse all the time in real life conversations, so why throw this guy out of school just because he’s going all out on Twitter?

Austin has been transferred to another school in the area so he could graduate, but he is disappointed that he had to leave Garrett because of the number of things he wanted to do with his friends before leaving.

So is it really fair to allow schools to actively monitor all content posted on social networks? While Austin’s message may not have been the most mature way to express a feeling about something, he definitely didn’t seem to be planning to endanger anybody or anything. The one time I got in trouble for cursing in school, my parents got called in and we had a talk, and things were normal again the day after.