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Student, Denied Degree For MySpace Photo, Sues
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue May 08, 2007 07:02 AM
from the striking-back dept.
from the striking-back dept.
gwoodrow writes "We've all heard the 'fired because of MySpace' stories, where a simple blog or picture gets someone canned. But now one of the targets is fighting back. (The offending picture in this case was a snap from Halloween 2005 of the student in a pirate outfit drinking from a cup.)" From the article: "Teacher in training Stacy Snyder was denied her education degree on the eve of graduation when Millersville University apparently found pictures on her MySpace page 'promoting underage drinking.' As a result, the 27-year-old mother of two had her teaching certificate withheld and was granted an English degree instead. In response, Snyder has filed a Federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania university asking for her education diploma and certificate along with $75,000 in damages."
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umm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure they originally thought she was 20 in the picture, and wanted to withhold her teaching certificate for underage drinking. Then when they found out she was 25 in the photo, they changed their story to not wanting anyone who has had alcohol touch their virgin lips to be teaching young children, rather than admitting they were wrong.
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
A system of formal complaints that can screw up your life must be accountable, if formal complaints are to be taken seriously then abuse of the system needs to be puni$hed.
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Funny)
Well the solution is simple. Adopt a drinking age of 17/18 like here in Canada. She definitely doesn't look 18.
Alcohol?? Forget the alcohol. Statistically at least half of the female teachers would be performing oral sex on their husbands / boyfriends. And they are worried about alcohol on their lips?
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Informative)
That's what I though too, and since I figured at least one of us needed to actually RTFA I did. Strangely, that archive doesn't mention any other pictures:
Parent
"Somebody think of the children" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not encoureaging underage drinking, it's more of a sympthom of a society soaked in paranoia, unrealistic expectations and simplistic views of the world that clash with a modern age where a person's life and living will be more exposed and available.
So we have two choices now: a.) remove the access to insight into our lives, or restrict it radically, or b.) realise that the people that take care of your children are humans too, with all that entails. There are no saints here. It's not a bad thing.
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
no
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
You already understand that humans are utterly self-centered. Yet many of them have that irresistible desire to control others. It's a paradox, but still frighteningly logical...
Humans seek to control in others what they wish they could control in themselves.
They hate it when other people are having more fun than they are.
And they will cling to their moral rules even after those rules have lost their basis. (Certainly the mutual enforcement of morality is justifiably important in any family, tribe, or society, and certaintly this is an unending chore. But still: moral rules exist to maximize something; they are not divine ends-in-themselves.)
The current war against birth control illustrates all three phenomena of control:
You: "But birth control ends that risk; therefore, there is no longer any basis for condemning promiscuous behavior. Your moral rule is obsolete."
Them: "Then to protect morality, we must ban birth control."
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
And that, right there, is what I find most terrifying. People think that an arational theocracy is OK, if the beliefs that it's imposing on others is "good" in their estimation -- meaning that it's their set of beliefs. Of course, What's "good" is highly subjective. There are a lot of people in the world who think that Sharia law is just fine and dandy, and we'd all be a lot better if we buried cheating women up to their heads in sand and stoned them to death. Once you've accepted the premise that arationality is acceptable in government, it's just a matter of degree how far you decide to go in impressing your superstitions on everyone else. You may draw the line at just telling people who they can have sex with, while someone else may go further and tell them what clothes they can wear -- there's no difference in kind there, just of degrees.
Either you reject theocracies on premise, or you have to accept nearly all of them, since there is no rational basis for presuming that any one set of superstitions is superior to any other.
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
You have missed the point of the argument. A group opposes promiscuity on moral grounds. Moral grounds are not a valid reason to pass a law, so they develop a related social issue, unintentional babies. When their social issue is ameliorated while still allowing people to partake in the "immoral" activity, they try to ban things in an effort to restore the social problem.
In any case, not everyone who has sex for pleasure is doing it as a fling. Many people in committed relationships simply do not want children, and thus partake in sex via safe means.
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
It is perfectly fine for you to decided that you want to dedicate yourself to a relationship with one person. If you ask my opinion about the potential pitfalls along that approach, I'll tell you want I think [unreasonable.org], but tell you, "knock yourself out - whatever works for you".
It is not ok for you to decide that I should dedicate myself to a relationship with one person; you don't get to dictate what style of relationship makes me happy, any more that you get to decide what sort of music makes me happy. You are free to report your own experiences, preferences, even speculations: but when you attempt to tell me how I "should" love, you've left the realm of useful discourse. And when attempts are made through public policy to dicate how people "should" love, a sane society would hand those poltiicans a whuppin'.
Non sequitor. B & E is a violation of the rights of others; if my girlfriends and I decide to have open relationships, that's not a violation of anyone's rights.
What in the world does that mean, that you "have a problem" with other people's personal sexual choices? How does my choice cause you any problem?
I hear a lot more discussion and thought from the polyamoury community about the nature of relationships than I do from most folks, so charges of "shallow" fall flat. And I see honest non-monogamous models working quite for many people - certainly much better than the dishonest non-monogamous model that condemnation like yours pushes people into.
Again: whatever works for you, fine and dandy. But your opinions about the choices of others seem based on faulty data.
Parent
Re:umm - throwing the BS flag (Score:5, Insightful)
No it doesn't. There is still a 0.001% chance of contracting an STD from a gynecologist visit, a 0.0012% chance of contracting genital warts from a toilet seat, a 0.0019% chance of becoming pregnant while being unconscious and raped during any given hospital stay, etc.
The only SURE way to avoid STD's and pregnancy is a successful suicide. So I would like to encourage my right-wing religious friends to consider that as an option--if you TRULY want to remain pure, that is. It's the only way to be sure.
Parent
Not a straw man (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. It would be a straw man argument if he claimed these were the spoken arguments against birth control. But he doesn't, he speculate that these are the unspoken reasons (at least #1 and #2).
It does show a total lack of respect for the opponents. Nothing wrong with that. The official spoken arguments for certain positions, such as alien visitors, creationism or the immorality of birth control are utterly insane. Trying to counter them with rational arguments are a total waste of time, as they are not based on rational thinking.
It is much more productive to try to analyze which emotional needs makes people hold to these irrational positions. Once you understand the true reasoning behind them, you can start working on filling the emotional need the motivates them, and the positions become irrelevant.
> You have put those with different opinions than you in a box, and then made up there thoughts so
> you can be better than them... isn't that what your post was complaining about in the first
> place?
Nope, he was complaining about people trying to control others behavior. Not about people trying to change others opinions.
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it really that hard to believe that people who hold certain opinions and then attempt to force those beliefs onto others really are shittier people?
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, Conestoga Valley School District were threatening to not recruit any more teachers from her university, unless she was punished in some way.
Regardless of the picture, the School District or college have no right to amend her graduation qualifications, based on a single party photograph.
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
insight in the american psyche (Score:5, Insightful)
In my country, nobody would give a rats' ass if a teacher DId say she/he got drunk the night before. What, you think pupils or students are going to get traumatised? Seems to be going on a lot of traumas, lately, including 'online rape'. For Gods' sake; when are you guys going to get a grip? Your problems mainly stem just *because* you treat youth as if they were some alien beings who can have no idea what's the real world all about. Of course, they DO know all to well, but because of the paniced reactions everywhere, they never have learned how to deal with it in a normal fashion.
To be 21 before you can sip a glass of alcohol...meh; ridiculous. In most european countries, you can drink alcohol when you're 16. and when your parents let see sip from their beers, even when you're only nine, no-one makes any fuss about it - because it isn't. the rerality is, if ypou treat drinking beer as no big deal, and you let them taste it, they usually go: "yukkie, that's awful." and don't want to try it out anymore. Also, when you drink with kids in a social context (e.g. not binge drinking stuff), they are more inclined to follow that pattern. If you treat it as something special, it gets 'forbidden fruit' status, and if they only have peers to look how to act when confronted with alcohol, that's when shit happens.
In france, kids often drink 'table-wine' (wine with moderate alcohol-level) as a normal thing, in Belgium the same with table-beer, etc. do they have more drunks and alcohol-problems there, then in the USA with its 21-year law? Not at all. In fact, the prevalence of problematic drinking (like binge-drinking) is way LOWER there than in anglo-saxon countries, where the restriction to alcohol is much more severe. The whole concept of 'save the children' in the USA has gone way overboard, to the detriment of the youths themselves.
In a reasonable country, the fact that a teacher was drunk has nothing to do with her professionalism *unless* she was drunk during the course of her work, obviously. But if she got drunk outside her professional hours, even if she puts hundreds of photos about it on the net, it doesn't say anything about her capacities as a teacher. It's the same crap and obsession of the USA with irrelevant nonsense as back with Clinton getting a blowjob, over and over again. What you do in your private life - EVEN if it comes out in the open (as long as it's legal) - DOES NOT and SHOULD NOT have any bearings on how you are treated while exercising your profession.
In the USA, I wonder if a teacher can say something which is scientifically true but socially/politically-incorrect, like stating that moderate consumption of alcohol is actually healthy. These days, especially in the bible-belt states, I think no teacher can say that without risk of being fired or being severly reprimanded. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this. That obsession of weeding out the political incorrect and having to 'cry wolf' with all the other wolves (the prevailing mentality) is sickening.
In summary:
1)Drinking is no big deal
2)Posting pics about it is no big deal
Conclusion: as long as whatever she does is not illegal and does not affect her actual professionalism in the classroom, there is no reason why she should be treated the way she was. And even if it was illegal and did affect her teachings, then still it should be determined if it was severe enough to warrant the withdrawal of her diploma.
Parent
No BS please (Score:5, Funny)
Arrr.
Obviously! (Score:5, Funny)
Students only go to uni to leech movies and music and drink underage, getting a degree is just a bonus!!!
Parent
Re:Obviously! (Score:5, Funny)
Let me correct that for you: -
only students in the US go to uni to leech music and movies and drink underage, students everywhere else go to uni to drink.
Parent
Re:Obviously! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:No BS please (Score:5, Funny)
So, not for the first time, he noodled the School Board...
Parent
Don't you mean (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Well (Score:5, Interesting)
But I must be thankful that the new wave of religious moralism has not (yet) arrived here from America... But sadly, I expect it to arrive very soon...
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
So what they're saying here is... (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously ninja have infiltrated the schools administrative staff...
Re:So what they're saying here is... (Score:5, Insightful)
And whereas yes they do get 3 months a year off, most of the don't make enough to avoid needing to get a summer job. Many of them are either working on grading papers and preparing lesson plans at home, or they're putting 12 hour days in at the school keeping up with some of it. The worst part is knowing how many of them honestly want to instill that vital critical thinking nugget in the heads of kids, but then get beaten down with the fact that they have to teach to a standardized test because that's what they'll be reviewed over.
Maybe where you're at the teachers job is a cushy one, but from my observations in a non suburb city it isn't. The only teachers I know who are thriving and loving the job all teach at private schools, and there aren't enough of those jobs to go around.
Parent
hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not judging either way, but is it not a possibility that the 'victim' here is screaming loudly about a single innocuous piece of evidence while failing to mention any of the other relevant details or bits of evidence in the 'case'?
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
"...One of the concerns that Ms. Snyder's cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking, expressed to Ms. Snyder throughout the semester was the importance of maintaining a professional working relationship with students and not to become overly familiar with them regarding her personal life. Among other things, Ms. Snyder had been inviting students to log onto her MySpace Web site, and Ms. Reinking counseled her repeatedly to stop doing so."
If this is the case, perhaps the school district and the university were quite well justified. In this case, the issue wasn't the website or the photo, but her conduct in the classroom and with the students related to the website. One might even say that her conduct was encouraging underage drinking not because she drank or took pictures, but because she in essence said to students, "Look, I'm cool, I get drunk at parties." That's much more nuanced than just the fact that she put the pictures up online since it involves actively promoting the pictures in the classroom.
Parent
Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
What is the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not getting a couple things here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Underage hot chocolate drinking? (Score:5, Funny)
The only reason I could think of to punish her is for the bad pirate costume, and the fact that the plastic cup is out of character.
This is Pennsylvania, remember (Score:5, Interesting)
(1) Arrested in the hospital for public drunkenness and underage drinking after you are taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning a day before your 21st bday. This actually happened to a friend. I guess that it's far better to let students with alcohol poisoning choke on their own vomit than go to the hospital and risk getting arrested.
(2) Arrested for felony riot for telling a cop who had just hit a fellow student in the face at a Red Cross benefit show that he'd be better off helping clean up NYC after 9/11 than harrassing students who ARE actually trying to help. This actually happened to me a few weeks after 9/11/2001, and fucked with my life for the next few years (difficult to get a job, probation basically required for me to move out of state).
In short; to Hell with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the puritanical prigs who seem to run the government and apparently non-governmental organizations as well.
-b.
Pennsylvania (Score:5, Insightful)
The longer I live... (Score:5, Funny)
Sometimes, I really dislike the behavior of some of my fellow Americans.
Digging a little deeper (Score:5, Interesting)
Which leads one to believe that the university was being pressured from the district to do something about her and let them save face. Presumably the district feels they're in a position of enough power (taking on most of their students for their student teaching assignments?) that they could do this.
However, if you look at the response from Conestoga Valley, available on their website here [k12.pa.us], they state that's untrue, and include some more information not linked in the Washington Post article, including what they claim is the offending Myspace blog post which is not the picture hosted by thesmokinggun.com which the WP article links to. It could be a little damning towards her if you believe the district that she was actively encouraging the kids to go to her Myspace page, but then, not knowing what her page is (I would imagine by now it's either been deleted or locked down anyway) it'd be hard to say whether the content therein is really unacceptable for the students to see.
One quote from their response troubles me to some degree though, from her cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking:
Certainly that can be taken any number of ways, some good, some bad, but taking it simply at face value, it saddens me to see where education has gone these days. Growing up in rural Maine (not that there's really any other kind of Maine
Regardless, in the end I'm a little surprised and frightened that a university feels they have the ability to do this. That after someone has paid them tens of thousands of dollars for their education, and has presumably satisfactorily completed the academic requirements, they can one day before graduation tell you "Yeah, we're not going to give you the degree you wanted, have this English degree instead." What's to keep them from doing that to someone else because they don't like brunettes or people from Alaska? (Don't answer that, I know it's a stupid question.
Re:She was not denied her degree (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:She was not denied her degree (Score:5, Interesting)
It's lunacy -- I heard the story a few days ago and figured there must be more to it, but having read more about it now, I don't think there is. Apparently if you have any semblance of an adult life outside school, you're unfit to teach (according to the Morals Police).
Reminds me of the Sprout Goodnight Show host and her firing -- she'd been in some short PSA spoofs about sex SEVEN YEARS before she worked at Sprout (which is a 24-hour PBS Kids network), but parents pressured PBS to fire her and they did so. I guess all that matters is that someone thinks something is bad -- that's now apparently enough to make it true. Here's the Sprout story [sfgate.com], by the way. My kid didn't seem to care, but I'm sure others did.
Parent
Re:She was not denied her degree (Score:5, Informative)
http://bbsnews.net/article.php/20070502234811315 [bbsnews.net]
Seems she'd been reprimanded as a student teacher several times and she knew she was in the wrong. It doesn't seem to be as cut and dried as the original article would have us believe. Also, the picture posted in the original article is different than the one in the above article. Two very different images that give completely different impressions of a "teacher" if seen by students.
Parent
Re:She was not denied her degree (Score:5, Insightful)
So she was reprimanded, did she get a passing grade? If yes, then give her the cert, if not deny her the cert. And just because she gets her cert doesn't mean they have to give her a recommendation or hire her.
But if they pull that BS she should get enough money from the school system so she doesn't have to work, the people recall most of the school board and the superintendent is forced to resign. Its called you screwed somebody's life over, now you get to pay.
Parent
Re:She was not denied her degree (Score:5, Funny)
But what can you do with an English degree? It she doesn't teach, the only other thing she could probably do is open a Poem Repair shop.
Parent
Re:She was not denied her degree (Score:5, Informative)
Excerpt: "However, school district solicitor Howard L. Kelin said Tuesday that criticism of the teachers contained in the lawsuit is unfair.
Kelin disputes the allegations the teachers, Deann Buffington and Nicole Reinking, influenced the college to withhold the degree.
Snyder was given a poor evaluation based on her performance while teaching at the high school and was warned not to direct students to her MySpace page, which contained the questionable photographs, Kelin said.
Despite being warned to maintain a professional relationship with her students Kelin said, Snyder continued to direct students to her Web page.
Parent
Re:It's the cup (Score:5, Funny)
And by being a mother of two she is promoting under age sex as well.
Parent
Re:Image is... something. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because only the truly debauched party at Halloween.
Parent