Via Ars Technica
By Julian Sanchez
| Published: December 05, 2008 – 10:01AM CT
Stacy Snyder, a federal court has ruled, won’t be teaching kids the three Arrrrs
any time soon: They’ve rejected Snyder’s claim that her First Amendment
rights were violated when a MySpace photo showing her engaged in a bit
of boozy buccaneering, as well as posts complaining about her
relationship with a supervisor, cost the former Millersville University
student a teaching degree.
In 2006, Snyder had been a student teacher at Conestoga Valley High
School in Pennsylvania, as required by both Millersville’s teaching
curriculum and the state’s teacher certification guidelines. Her
performance reviews often complained of Snyder’s lack of
professionalism—and her shaky grasp of the subject matter she had been
assigned to teach.
But the final straw for the school came when they saw that Snyder’s
MySpace account—which she had mentioned to students on several
occasions—contained a photo of the grog-swilling Snyder in a pirate
hat, captioned “drunken pirate,” as well as posts alluding to her
fraught relationship with her supervisor. They called Snyder at home
and told her to walk the plank out of their student teaching program.
Since she’d failed to complete her student teaching practicum,
Millersville denied Snyder a teaching degree, instead shuffling some
credits around to award her a BA in English.
Snyder took the school to court, and while judge Paul Diamond of the
District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania promptly
dismissed her due process claims, as well as several statutory claims,
he allowed her to press the argument that the denial had violated her
First Amendment right to free expression.
On Wednesday, however, the judge tossed that claim as well. Snyder,
Diamond found, “was an apprentice more akin to a public
employee/teacher than a student” during her time at CV High. As such,
the First Amendment protects her speech about matters of “public
concern”—she couldn’t be barred from the student-teaching program for
expressing an unpopular political opinion—but not personal MySpace
postings the school found to be unprofessional. Moreover, once the
school had declined to certify her completion of the program,
Millersville administrators had no authority to override the degree
requirements to award Snyder a teaching diploma.
A warning to prospective public employees, then: it may be that on the
Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But they are apt to find out if
you’re a drunken pirate.
