Expelled from Pre-School for Facebook Post

A four-year-old boy was just recently expelled from his pre-school for a Facebook post made by his mother, Ashley Habat. According to Habat, she was running late to drop her son, Will, off at Sonshine Christian Academy on picture day. The mother mentioned to the administrator during check-in that the school did not give her enough notice about picture day and that she wasn't prepared for it. The administrator made minimal comment, saying "well, we put it in his folder last week." Later that day, the woman felt the need to vent via Facebook, posting a (what she dubbed as "private") status that read, "why is it that every single day there is something new I dislike about Will's school? Are my standards really too high or are people working in the education field really just that ignorant?" and tagged the school in the post. The next morning, she was asked to stop by the office after dropping her son off and received a letter of dismissal from the school, stating that the parent-school relationship was not very good and that her son was thereby expelled.  This has not been the only case of students being punished by schools for social media posts. This past spring, several Texas high-schoolers were suspended for favoriting "HS Confessions" tweets on Twitter, along with many other cases.

I think that sometimes schools abuse their power by trying to control the social media of students and families of their students. How do you feel about schools monitoring student social media? Why do you think they do this?

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    • You seem to have conflicting opinions here. I'll give you that, on your first opinion, the internet is not a private place and you're ignorant if you think anything you post is "private." However, I still think we should all be allowed to post however we please, even if others dislike it. The mother doesn't seem overly intelligent to me and probably didn't consider internet privacy and freedom of speech without consequence in her post.

      As for your second opinion, I'll agree completely. The school overreacted and seems to like to think, like many other schools in America, that they can control everything that goes on in a student's life even outside of school, but punishing a child for something said by a parent is insane. If they can't handle comments of dislike, they need to shut down their school or toughen up, because no school will ever be perfect for everyone and they will always receive criticism.

  • In my opinion, I think that the mother should of thought before she posted, especially when tagging the school. I think the school should have some social media watch on their students and the parents, but I also think that out of school people have their own personal lives and information that could be kept private. I really don't think that the son should be the one who is basically punished by being expelled for his mothers action, and I think the school needs to find a different way to go about being talked bad about on social media. 

  • Anything that you think the school might not like to see should not be posted on social media. Social media is the downfall of many reputations and friendships and that is a prime example. 

  • I think that they need to do this because they need to be able to help the students if any problem should arise, and to monitor bullying. But I do not think that a PARENT making a comment and not the STUDENT, should result in student punishment if the student had nothing to do with what transpired between the parent and the school.

    • I agree with you to the extent that students should not be punished for anything the parent posts on social media, but I don't really think it's the job of the school to monitor social media to help students and monitor bullying outside of school. In fact, at some point it may be inappropriate for schools to delve into student's lives that they don't share directly with the school.

  • I don't believe that they have a right to control social media. If it is an out of school incident, it's not their business. I believe that they just do this to create drama and start arguments. They don't need to go that far with an incident. They could have sat down and had a discussion with the mother. They could have asked her how they could make the pre-school better, and then ask her to delete the post. They could have problem solved instead of what they did.

  • I don't like that schools monitor social media. I think they monitor social media because that way they know the opinions of their students on what they think of the school. In this article, i feel like the school is trying to hide what parents don't like about the school, and expelling the kids to cover up what is wrong with the school.  

    • I think you have a great line of thinking behind the reasoning for this school expelling this boy. Maybe another reason schools punish kids for social media posts is because they are trying to uphold this unattainable image of perfection and aren't tolerable whatsoever of differences in what kids post.

  • I do agree with it because all of us have to think before we post, so when we don't think before we post, we may have to feel the consequences, and it isn't bad for the school to monitor the social media. 

    • While we all should always think before we post anything on social media, I feel like it would be ridiculous for this mother, or any mother, to sit and weigh the consequences a status update may have on her son before hitting the "post" button. If people are fearing their kids being expelled from school for their own usage of social media, I think the school may be the one with the problem, not the parents.

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