News-Record.com

Seems like a good time to teach young 'uns about anonymous blogging (and the limits of it). This seems to be another ridiculous attempt to regulate communication (they did it with radio, then with TV, they'll do it with whatever's next).

However, this is a private school that can set its own rules. If you don't like the rules, you can always leave the school.

If they want to control their students' lives, they should at least be honest enough not to lie about it. If safety was the school's real concern, it would be issuing safety guidelines, not blanket orders. Does the school order its students to wear seat belts? Because injuries in a wreck are a far greater risk for its students than anything that could happen because of a blog.

Of course, the only enforcement that can happen is with blogs that contain identifying information. Every student in that school could be posting anonymously, talking about "the penguin" or "Father X" and no one at the school could ever find it.

Seems pretty clear that the real safety the school is most interested in is for its public image. I note that the way the press checked on compliance was: "A search of both myspace.com and xanga.com Wednesday by The Associated Press found no postings by users who mentioned the school."

Considering how easy it is to get around this "ban," I hope the school administration is run totally ragged trying to hunt down those who defy them.

But this also makes me wonder: why now? They've had this rule on the books for 5 years. The story doesn't mention any threats to students or incidents that made the "danger" more apparent to anyone. Did some nosy administrator take a look in the blogsphere and find some unflattering notes about the school, or some unsavory "exposures" of things that have been going on there?