Law Enforcement Perspectives on Cyberbullying
Much of our work to teach adults about what teens are doing online is directed toward educators or parents, but increasingly we are working with law enforcement officers – especially those assigned to a school setting (school resource or liaison officers). Like the others, police officers often find themselves in a difficult situation when confronted […]
Jostens Renaissance 2011: You Make it Matter
As regular readers of this blog will know, Sameer and I have had a long partnership with Jostens. When I was in high school in the mid-1990s, our class rings and yearbooks came from Jostens, so I knew of the brand. About four years ago, Charley Nelson, who is the director of educator services for […]
Bullying and Cyberbullying Laws – Clarifications on our Fact Sheet
Our state-by-state bullying and cyberbullying laws fact sheet is one of the top-most documents downloaded from our site; we encourage you to check it out if you haven’t already. That said, it is also a fluid resource that we are constantly updating. Some recent questions have been posed, and so I wanted to take the […]
Bullying and Cyberbullying Laws – Clarifications on our Fact Sheet
Our state-by-state bullying and cyberbullying laws fact sheet is one of the top-most documents downloaded from our site; we encourage you to check it out if you haven’t already. That said, it is also a fluid resource that we are constantly updating. Some recent questions have been posed, and so I wanted to take the […]
The Great Debate: Should Cyberbullying be a Criminal Offense?
We have received numerous requests from high school students and teachers over the last several weeks for information about whether or not there should be a criminal law to cover cyberbullying. It seems that this is a national high school debate topic this year. Since we have discussed this issue quite a bit on this […]
The Current State of Cyberbullying Laws
It is imperative that everyone who works with youth, but especially law enforcement officers, stay up-to-date on the ever-evolving state and local laws concerning online behaviors, and equip themselves with the skills and knowledge to intervene as necessary. In recent survey of approximately 500 school resource officers from around the United States, we found that […]
Should Parents Ban Access to Facebook?
Our colleague Anne Collier from NetFamilyNews made us aware of an email that Anthony Orsini, a middle school principal from New Jersey, sent to parents a couple of weeks ago imploring them to prohibit their children from participating in social networking sites. As reported on CBS and elsewhere, the letter Orsini sent to parents included […]
Is Cyberbullying Simply an Expression of Free Speech?
A colleague of mine recently posed the following questions after listening to my recent interview on Wisconsin Public Radio: Q: If a student were bullying someone & claimed they had the right of freedom of speech to say whatever they want, how would you respond? Q: If a public official felt they were being bullied […]
Quick Poll: Do You Think Schools Should be Able to Discipline Students for Hurtful Facebook Pages?
We’ve had quite a bit of feedback regarding our recent post that discussed whether or not schools can discipline students for creating a Facebook page that is critical of, or harassing toward, a staff member. The courts have given their perspective on a few different cases, but I thought I would post this simple poll for […]
Meep
An interesting controversy has emerged in the last couple of weeks over the word “meep.” What does meep even mean? Frankly, it doesn’t really matter. In fact there are numerous and varied definitions of, and uses for, the word meep. The most frequent use among adolescents, it seems, is to replace an inappropriate word with […]
