Unintended consequences

The story of four boys, two unthinking school administrators, and one police investigation

by Dan Sheridan

Last February, four eighth-graders were suspended from the Central Middle School in Quincy. As of this writing, only two of the students have been allowed back to school. Their crime? They wrote a sexually explicit takeoff on the US Constitution that contained the initials of some of their classmates. Since their handwritten document was turned in by a snooping fellow student, the students -- all boys -- have been publicly shamed with accounts of their writing in the local papers, and they've been investigated by Quincy police.

With so many school officials suffering from post-Columbine jitters, maybe we shouldn't be surprised by the suspensions. Just last month, Boston Latin Academy ordered student Charles Carithers suspended for writing a story that scared the junior-year English teacher -- who had assigned students to write a horror story. Carithers wrote about a student who takes a chain saw to a difficult teacher and kills her. Not an attractive concept, of course, but it has worked ever since director Tobe Hooper turned a noisy McCulloch into a slash-movie device of choice in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And in another incident that echoes some aspects of the Quincy case, officials at New York University called in police after roommates of sophomore John Paul Denning read his e-mail and found violent notes that he had sent to a friend back home. According to the Boston Globe, Denning wrote: "I want to go out and shoot as many people as I can and then shoot myself to even the number. . . . Maybe I should stop showing people my new gun, but I'm so proud of it. Makes me feel like a real New Yorker." Denning, the Globe reported, was taken by police to Bellevue Hospital, where he was committed for three days. As it turns out, Denning was playing to his friend's dark sense of humor when he wrote the e-mails. Hospital officials released Denning when they called the friend and reached his answering machine -- which consisted of a taped spoof of the horror movie Army of Darkness, with the sound of chain saws in the background.

Unlike what Carithers or Denning wrote, however, the Quincy students' take on the Constitution didn't contain threats. (The Phoenix does not have a copy of the document, but reports of what's in it come from the Quincy schools superintendent, Central Middle School's principal, a Quincy police lieutenant, and a middle-school teacher -- all of whom have read the document.) And these students didn't hit anyone or wave guns. They didn't break any laws. They didn't mouth off to a teacher. They didn't even write on walls. What got them thrown out of school, what brought police to their homes, was dirty words.

"This whole thing just reeks of censorship," says John Roberts, executive director of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union. "They had no right at all to discipline the kids for what they wrote. What they wrote might be offensive, but it was not illegal. It was not anything that was done under the aegis of the school. It was a private document."

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According to the principal, superintendent, and police, the students used obscenities to describe their thoughts about sex in an 18-page parody of the US Constitution. Their hand-written document suggested, in the delicate words of Quincy Schools Superintendent Eugene Creedon, that the boys would love to receive the sexual favors of three girls at the school. They didn't name the girls, the superintendent said, but they did use initials. The paper also had what Creedon called a "not so nice" racial tone.

Was it violent? Creedon says it wasn't. Principal Frank Santoro is a bit less certain. "Well, it depends on who you are," he says. "If you're the parent of one of the girls, it may be violent, you know. The interpretation depends on who is reading it." Which goes to the heart of the problem with this case: the document is in possession of the Quincy police, so it's impossible to say what, exactly, the students wrote. To judge from the school officials' response, we can assume the material was obnoxious -- even offensive. But all descriptions given so far of what the students wrote -- even of the "not so nice" racial tone -- indicate that it was protected speech. Remember, they didn't write this on the bathrooms walls; they didn't publish their parody on the Web. They hand-wrote a document that, by all accounts, they intended to keep private.

The signed document, which police said had a preamble, articles, and amendments, was written in December and sat in a student's backpack for more than a month. Then another child took the backpack containing the wrinkled screed and gave it to his parents. The parents gave it to Santoro. Instead of telling the pack grabber that he shouldn't take what wasn't his, Santoro called the police.

Parents of the boys and of several girls (presumably those whose initials were believed to be in the document) were called in to meet with police and school administrators. Three assemblies were called within the week, one for each grade, to explain what had happened and to let kids talk about their feelings. Some girls stood up and said they were horrified at what the boys had written. Their parents demanded that something be done. Police visited the boys' homes. Administrators said a girl at the school told them that one of the youths had previously taunted girls and threatened to bring a gun to school. But police found no evidence that any of the boys had access to guns.

Santoro maintains that he didn't call the cops to seek punishment for the writers. "They were there for consultation reasons, if a parent wanted to ask questions, legal questions," he says. "Yes, we made police available to parents if they were in need. We had a meeting as a result of the document. And at that meeting were the parents of all the children involved, both the victims as well as those that were the authors. And we thought it best that the police were available for consultation. They weren't called in to do anything in terms of penalty."

But Quincy police said they conducted a criminal investigation. "We're going to treat anything like this seriously," Lieutenant Thomas Malvesti told the Patriot Ledger. "We're making sure the victims receive whatever they might need. And we're making sure the people responsible for this are disciplined." The authors and signers of the document were bounced from school on February 3. Schoolwork was sent home to the four kids each day of their initial 10-day suspension. On Creedon's orders, the two boys who haven't been allowed back to school are being tutored "elsewhere in the system," Santoro says.

According to Santoro, the different degrees of punishment reflect the fact that some of the boys "authored" the document while the others "just signed" it. But the ACLU's Roberts says the school's decision to suspend any of the boys rests on dubious legal ground. The kids didn't do anything, Roberts emphasizes; they didn't take any action. They merely wrote something.

"If they call police for people thinking about sex, then we're all in trouble," Roberts says. "This was a purloined letter. It was taken by someone who had no right to take it. It was given to the school, which had no right to it. And then these kids are disciplined -- not only by the school, but it's handed over to the police. And despite all the post-Columbine hysteria, these kids didn't do anything illegal. So it had all kinds of sexual stuff. The school had no right to have it."

Even though the material could be seen as vulgar and demeaning to women, and even though authorities can guess the identity of the three girls identified in the document by their initials, Roberts says the case "just doesn't meet any kind of legal standards for sexual harassment. It's protected. It may be disgusting. It may be offensive. It may be sexist. But it is protected."

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You might not think it from this case, but students in Massachusetts have more legal right to free expression than kids anywhere else in the country. In 1974, the state legislature passed a Student Free Expression Act that relied on voluntary compliance from school officials. In 1988, the law was amended to make compliance mandatory.

"The statute is a very broad defense of kids' rights to write in school papers and in things like that," Roberts says. It was motivated by a perceived threat to students' rights from the US Supreme Court, which had begun reversing a trend toward increased protection for student speech that was seen in the 1960s and '70s. In the 1986 case Bethel School District v. Fraser, the court sided with officials who killed a student's graduation speech and disciplined the student because the speech contained sexual double entendres. In 1988's Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the court upheld the decision of school officials to censor student-newspaper articles on divorce and teen pregnancy, issues that administrators said they didn't want in a school newspaper.

"Students in Massachusetts lobbied through this free-expression act," Roberts says. "Everyone thought it was very nice. Sort of a wonderful illustration of democracy, kids who went up and lobbied their own thing. It was all free expression that sounded good."

That is, until 1993, when school officials in South Hadley sent home two students for wearing T-shirts that read COED NAKED BAND: DO IT TO THE RHYTHM. The students sued their school, and the case eventually landed in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled that the statute is "unambiguous" in its support for such activities. "The act was upheld by the SJC," Roberts says. "No one seems now to know that. Kids have a great deal of protection that is not enjoyed in other places."

Then how can superintendents and principals in places such as Quincy and Boston do what they've done? "They do it because no one challenges them," Roberts says.

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I guess it's confession time.

Despite the best efforts of my fine parents, despite the good nuns at St. Mary's grade school and the warnings of old Father O'Neill about the devil's works and sins of the flesh, as an eighth-grader I actually had impure thoughts about some of my fellow students, including Carol, Nancy, and Roberta. And, I'm ashamed to say, a few other girls.

Not that I would have known what to do had those girls noticed me. But as a precocious eighth-grader, I awkwardly jotted down a few fantasy scenarios. And other boys, believe it or not, drew cartoons to go with their lewd, disgusting, and thoroughly unenlightened seventh- and eighth-grade erotic thoughts. Maybe, for all I know, the girls did the same thing. We smirked; we probably giggled. Thankfully, Sister Regis never found our sinful works. But that was years ago.

Today's kids aren't so different, though. A Quincy teacher, a respected one who knows the present-day miscreants, describes the writing that so shocked administrators as kind of a lame diary, non-graphic and benign. "It was a half-assed attempt at being a club document," says the teacher, who says of the suspensions: "This was just so out of proportion to what happened. It's a new principal carrying political correctness to a ridiculous extreme. Some of my colleagues said it was crazy.

"These are 14-year-old boys," the teacher says. "It was much ado about nothing."

Well, not quite nothing. It wasn't very nice what the boys wrote. And given that a snitch has broadcast their private, dirty thoughts to the world, the boys should show some manners and apologize. Were she still around, God rest her soul, Sister Regis would wash their mouths out with soap.

But this is not just about a few dirty words. School officials taught kids that the Bill of Rights doesn't mean much in school. They taught children that they'd better not put anything controversial on paper, and that they'd better avoid unapproved ways of thinking.

In a phone call, the schools superintendent denied that the suspensions were an exercise in shaming, although the Patriot-Ledger quoted him as saying the boys needed "to experience a bit of shame." "They were suspended," Creedon told me, "under various situations of our discipline code as to disrespect, abusive and offensive language, the potential of interfering with the educational process, disruption at school, verbal harassment." The "potential" of interfering with the educational process? By writing a tasteless private document that they didn't tell anyone else about? "I don't want to continue this conversation," Creedon said.

No, if I had tossed these kids out I wouldn't want to talk about it either. Maybe they all should have their mouths washed out with soap.

Dan Sheridan is a reporter and editor from Chicago who is now working in Boston. He can be reached at news@kidsboston.com.