Mary Greenberg of Lake Bluff, who has a son at Libertyville High School, argued the district is overstepping its bounds.

"I don't think they need to police what students are doing online," she said. "That's my job."

Associate Superintendent Prentiss Lea rebuffed that criticism.

"The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

This is either a poorly done article or Lea is a doofus. The two comments are unconnected. The parent didn't say it was an invasion of privacy. She said it was outside the schools purview. Those are two different things entirely.

I happen to agree with the parent. Illegal is one thing, but even then, the school should stay out of it. If someone's seriously writing about blowing up the school or something on a blog, it should be reported to the POLICE, not the superintendent. Though, I think that's bad enough, since some people will take everything seriously even when it's not intended to be.

Furthermore, it disturbs me that Lea doesn't get the problem here. Why do school administrators forget what it's like to be a teenager? It's not hard enough, so now, on top of all the other shit, you have to worry about every single thing you say on your blog? That's ridiculous and offensive. Who decides what's "inappropriate"? We know the answer of course, and it's total bullshit.

Not that any high school kids read this, but I have a message : Don't put up with that shit. Rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks.* Your parents can certainly exercise the right to define what you do in your free time, but the school should fuck right off in that regard.

* The line, of course, is from Pump Up The Volume which, in 1990, treated this issue pretty well, I think, thematically anyway. Talk Hard.

School District to Monitor Student Blogs - Yahoo! News