ANTI-BULLYING LAW

Is it legally necessary or an over-reaction? Our elected officials in another knee jerk reaction to a tragic event, a teen suicide, decided to show their sympathy by passing what is probably the most unnecessary and costly piece of legislation for school districts and law enforcement in the past 20 years. The new law defines bullying as the repeated use by a student toward another student of written, verbal or electronic expression or physical act or gesture which: 1. Causes physical or emotional harm to the victim’s property; 2. Places the victim in reasonable fear of harm to himself or of damage to his property; 3. Creates a hostile environment at school for the victim; and 4. Infringes on the rights of the victim at school or materially and substantially disrupts the education process or the orderly operation of a school. This will include cyber bullying as well. The law applies to public or private school students of an elementary or secondary school. The next logical step will be a future amendment to include college students, as well.

Cyber bullying for those of you who don’t know has been defined as the use of technology or any electronic communication which includes any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by wire, radio, electromagnetic, photo-electronic or photo-optical system, including but not limited to email, internet communications, instant messages or facsimile communications. Cyber bullying also includes someone who creates a web page or blog and assumes the identity of another person or a knowing impersonation of another person as the author of posted content or messages if the creation or impersonation creates any of the conditions enumerated in the previous clauses.

This is a confusing and unimaginable concoction of words, many of which are clearly prohibited from limitation by our Constitution. When will our lawmakers learn that you cannot restrict the freedom and free speech of 99.9% of the student population to protect 100th of 1%. Some things can’t be legislated and this is a good example of a law that hopefully will be struck down as unconstitutional before our cash-strapped state, cities and towns and private schools are forced to spend millions and millions of dollars to increase police, court, school and social service personnel.