School Principal Admits To Tracking Student Tweets After Expelling Student For Profane Tweets

Here’s some news that should send terror into the hearts of every student who uses Twitter without considering what they are posting to the service for all the world, oh and their friends.

It seems that Austin Carroll at Garrett High School in Garrett Indiana was minding his own business and talking with friends on Twitter and as kids will the language being used was filled with the proverbial F-Bomb. So imagine his surprise when he went to school the next only to find out that he was being expelled for the use of profanity.

The school claimed that the tweet was made on school property during school hours however the only problem with that claim was that when looking at the details of the tweet that he was supposedly expelled for carries a timestamp of 2:30 AM which means that there is no way that this could have been written as the school claims.

Here is the tweet that got young Carroll in trouble (contains strong language):

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

via Techdirt

Has the problem with this whole thing registered yet?

How did the school know what he had written and why are they trying to punish a kid for something that has absolutely nothing to do with the school, even if he wrote it while he was at school.

Well it turns out that the school is monitoring all student Twitter accounts:

The principal at Garrett High School claims their system tracks all the tweets on Twitter when a student logs in, meaning even if he did tweet it from home their system could have recognized it when he logged in again at school.

via Indiana News

Keep in mind as well that he wasn’t just given a few days off from school to consider his actions but rather he has been expelled from the school for the rest of the school year in his senior year and with only three months to go.

Someone care to tell me how fair is this reaction by the school especially after violating his rights in the way that they did.