No clarification forthcoming this term on the boundaries and responsibilities of the school with regard to online student behavior.

The term "Emerging Technologies" is not a concept that is easy to pin down and a technology can be fully formed in one area of society but remain emergent in another. This is especially the case when emerging technologies enter the schoolhouse door. In the case of Facebook, for example, it's difficult to use the term "Emerging" when the social media platform reaches more than 700 million users world wide. Once through that schoolhouse door though, social media can be thought of as barely emergent.

One of the difficulties inherent whenever a new technology comes through the schoolhouse door is the determination of the legal boundaries and the legal responsibilities of the school. Most importantly the landmark was established in the 1969 case of Tinker v. Des Moines. This case established the idea that the school must show that a particular student expression poses a substantial disruption to the orderly operation of the school before action may be taken by the school against the student. This particular case involved a boy wearing an armband to school protesting US involvement in the Vietnam War.  the nearly half-century since Tinker, rapidly evolving digital technologies have complicated the legal landscape when school officials tried to determine what is protected speech and what constitutes a disruption to the operation of the school.

It appears that school officials will have to wait a little longer before the Court attempts to provide some clarification of this extremely complex and confusing issue.

Supreme Court Rejects Student Social-Media Cases

• By David Kravets January 17, 2012

The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to clarify on what grounds public schools may punish students for their off-campus online speech.

The justices have not squarely addressed the student-speech issue as it applies to the digital world — one filled with online social-networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others. The issue before the justices tests whether public schools may discipline students who, while off campus, use social-networking sites to mock school officials.

The lower courts have been all over the map on the First Amendment issue because they maintain they have been saddled with a Vietnam War-era high court precedent that predates the internet.
In the leading case of the three petitions the justices declined to review Tuesday, the lower court opinionurged the Supreme Court to end the confusion of whether that older case does indeed still hold in the internet age. The National School Boards Association also urged the high court to review the issue.
The association and others told the justices that “The ubiquitous use of social networking and other forms of online communication has resulted in a stunning increase in harmful student expression that school administrators are forced to address with no clear guiding jurisprudence.”
The 1969 Supreme Court precedent holds that student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it would “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands on campus to protest the Vietnam War.
But that precedent, which addressed on-campus speech, is often now being applied to students’ off-campus online speech four decades later — a conclusion that some lower courts have said is out of touch with today’s reality.
The leading case before the justices comes from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled last year that local Pennsylvania school district officials overreacted and breached the First Amendment rights (.pdf) of a junior high student who ridiculed her principal online, using a computer off-campus.
But in 2010, the same circuit court with a different set of judges approved of the 10-day suspension (.pdf) that the Blue Mountain School District handed the 14-year-old student, who mocked the principal with a fake MySpace profile. The 2007 profile insinuated the principal was a sex addict and pedophile.
In both rulings, the circuit based the decision on the 1969 Supreme Court precedent.
Five judges in the 2011 opinion wrote separately that the courts should abandon that precedent, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, because it does not pertain to online speech.