The Great Valley Middle School case in Malvern, Pennsylvania, has mostly faded from the news. As The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, some students created 22 faked TikTok accounts, “some depicting racist, homophobic, or sexually inappropriate content” that were attributed to teachers.

On Monday morning, Inquirer columnist Jonathan Zimmerman, pondered how to maintain freedom of speech for students and still avoid the ‘disruption’ student speech can sometimes cause. We need to listen to the students, he told readers, but missed an important point.

After the Great Valley social media scandal, we must balance free speech with ‘digital citizenship’

When is a student’s online activity so disruptive — or so threatening — that a school should punish it? That’s the big question. And we should be asking our students to help answer it.

by Jonathan Zimmerman | Monday, July 22, 2024 | 6:01 AM EDT

How should schools regulate what students post on the internet?

I don’t know. But here’s what I do know: We’ll never craft good policies around online student speech unless we listen to what students have to say.

That’s been the missing voice in the controversy in Great Valley, a Chester County school district where middle school students made 22 TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers. Some of the fake videos were truly horrible, casting the teachers as pedophiles or depicting them in sexual encounters with each other.

At a packed school board meeting last Monday, angry community members said the board should have taken more punitive action against the offending students. Many people in the audience were teachers, who argued that they should have a stronger role in helping the district make new rules around online behavior.

They’re right, of course. But we also need to engage students in the same deliberations. They’re the people who will be most directly affected by whatever the district decides. Somehow, it needs to protect students’ free speech and also protect them — and their teachers — from the types of vile attacks Great Valley witnessed this spring.

There’s more at the original. Dr Zimmerman continues to mention the legal obstacles through which a school would have to maneuver to regulate off-campus content, though he fails to note that students are an essentially captive population: every state has laws mandating attendance in the public schools unless a different, governmentally-approved accommodation is made.

But the point I have previously taken is that, while it’s silly to expect middle school students to be as mature as adults, perhaps the fake TikTok accounts were pointing out things that the students knew and were at least partially true? How many stories have we read in which teachers were sexually involved with students, taking photos involving child pornography, or ‘grooming’ students for some form of sexual or pornographic activity? In stating that we need to listen to the students, Dr Zimmerman made no suggestion that we ought to listen to what they were saying, but we all know that students know far more than we sometimes suspect.

Yes, it is very possible that every one of the faked TikTok accounts was a completely unfair slamming of teachers who had done nothing wrong, and yes, middle schoolers can be unrestrained and cruel, sexist, racist or ‘homophobic’; a lot of kids don’t like their teachers, or simply see some as mockworthy. But it is also true that middle schoolers can be savvy and smart and notice things which they’re not meant to see. They frequently don’t report such to their parents or teachers, but spread the gossip among themselves; even though I haven’t been in school since the time of quill pens and inkwells, I remember some of that. Yes, we all knew of one male teacher who seemed to pay undue attention to one very popular and pretty girl, though undue attention was all about which I was aware. With two daughters who were in middle and high school in the early 2000s, while they never said anything directly to me, I occasionally heard uncharitable gossip with their friends about other students.

As we reported on Saturday, the major media have been minimizing stories about teachers accused of sexually molesting students, but the stories keep on and keep on coming to us. When students publish messages like they did at Great Valley Middle School, it only makes sense to at least check to see if some of those messages are true.