Safety first

Settlement helps school stay focused

The Huntsville School District’s agreement to pay $42,665 settles a legal dispute over the expulsion of a student who posted a photo of himself with a gun to social media just days after a gunman killed 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., school.

As to the question of how school administrators facing similar situations should respond, Huntsville’s outcome leaves things entirely unsettled.

It was just a little more than a year ago when a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida entered the school and began the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history. In those days after the massacre, the nation learned the teenager accused in the shooting had signaled clearly that he had thoughts of engaging in a school shooting. Tips to law enforcement warned that he had a desire to kill people, was behaving erratically and had made disturbing social media posts that reflected his potential to carry out violence.

None of it triggered actions that came close to preventing a tragedy.

So, now, imagine yourself an administrator at a small school district in rural Northwest Arkansas. One of your students, less than two weeks after the bloodshed in Florida, has posted a photo of himself wearing a trench coat and holding a rifle. No words accompany the photo, but the trench coat harkens back to another episode of violence — the 1999 killing of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., by two seniors who wore black trench coats.

What to do?

In Huntsville, the answer was a yearlong expulsion for junior Kylan Pierce, who had posted the photo of himself on Instagram on Feb. 24, 2018. Another student responded to the photo with the message, “When I drop my pencil, start shooting,” according to a lawsuit filed by Pierce’s parent. Another wrote “school shooter meme.”

In the lawsuit, Pierce’s mother argued he was within his free speech rights to post the photo. He was emulating a 1920s gangster, the lawsuit claimed. The day after he posted the image, and after he saw some of the comments, he deleted the post.

It was too late to avoid its ripple effects within the school district. Administrators said the post was perceived as a potential threat of violence. Some teachers and students were scared enough that they did not want to go to school in the immediate aftermath of the post.

On March 5, the school board expelled Pierce, but allowed him to take core courses online. The lawsuit claimed the boy was defamed and not provided due process. His mother described him as a model student with “almost perfect grades.” As any loving parent would, she feared the repercussions the expulsion would have on his future.

School officials, in response, asserted “the expulsion at issue was reasonably and rationally related to the school administrator’s vital mission to keep students and teachers safe and to maintain order and normal operations within the educational institution.”

Pierce, for his part, followed up his post with a statement that “nothing bad was intended.” Perhaps reflecting his frustration at a situation that he started but quickly lost control of, he continued: “I’m an ambitious, young enterprising individual, who wouldn’t throw my future away for something as pointless as a school shooting. If I wanted to make an impact I would choose a much more high profile crowd th[a]n a bunch of hicks and jocks who are never going to be anything of particular value.”

No, that lack of contrition probably didn’t help his case.

So why settle this legal dispute? After all, what is a school system supposed to do when faced with a potential threat involving a gun? From a school district perspective, a student’s protest that he didn’t mean anything bad by it would hardly salve the pain if actual violence is the result.

Context matters a great deal. Had the student been posing in camouflage and orange, holding a rifle next to dead deer, he would have fit right in with thousands of kids across the state of Arkansas. Posing with a gun in a trench coat days after the Parkland shooting, whether intended or not, adds context that must be considered by responsible school administrators.

As with so many lawsuits these days, the fundamental goal of the legal eagles is to control the outcome. Letting a case play out in court, in most cases, is something to avoid because of the cost and uncertainty. As unsatisfactory as it might feel to those who see litigation as a way to determine who’s right and who’s wrong, sometimes settling the case is a fiscal decision, particularly when there doesn’t have to be an acknowledgement of wrongdoing.

The Huntsville School Board apparently saw it as a reasonable way to end the legal dispute with one of its students. In the process, the district gets to continue denying “any wrongdoing whatsoever.”

If you’re pretending to be a school administrator for a moment, consider this: Do you want to be the school official who declines to take action on a kid who posts to social media with a gun, in a way the disrupts others sense of security within the school environs?

And if you’re a parent and you discover a kid who posted such a photo to social media is going to be allowed to keep coming to school, what are you to do? Send your kid into a danger zone?

Especially these days, administrators can ill afford to ignore signs that portend danger. That’s even more true with all the alternatives schools can offer students, such as online classes, so that the impact on a student’s educational pursuits is limited.

The Huntsville School District’s unfortunate situation can serve as a warning to all parents and students about the importance of pausing before posting, of thinking clearly and deliberately before any action involving the use of a gun — even something that might seem harmless in the moment.

It’s not enough to consider what one intends. When it comes to communicating with diverse audiences through the Internet, one must consider how a post can be perceived.

Our hope is this dispute is but a momentary blip in the experience of young Mr. Pierce, one he ultimately learns a great deal from. And though it has now cost a public school system $42,665 in a settlement, that’s seems a small price to pay to protect administrators’ authority to take the steps necessary to protect their students, teachers and staff from threats and violence.