KeAndre Varner, a Georgia high school student, was suspended for four days Monday after he posted a mug shot of his principal to Instagram.
According to Atlanta's WSB-TV, Riverdale High School principal Jamille Miller-Brown was arrested in March for missing a court date related to a speeding ticket. Varner posted a photo of Miller-Brown's mugshot to Instagram. When one of his followers asked him what the arrest had been for, he replied that he thought it was for a DUI.
Varner's mother, Nakesha Thomas, told the station that the official reason for her son's suspension was that he'd passed around misinformation. Administrators said the boy had disrupted school by posting the photo and had been "belligerent" when Miller-Brown confronted him about it, the outlet notes.
Social media has gotten students in trouble before. In April, Kyron Birdine, a junior at a Texas high school, was suspended after tweeting a photo during a standardized test. Birdine said he had been made to take the test, despite it not having any bearing on his educational future, so he decided to protest it.
On the essay section of the state's STAAR test, Birdine wrote "I have the TAKS test to study for, not this unneeded craziness," followed by the acronym "YOLO" (you only live once) and a smiley face emoticon.
In another instance, a California student was suspended in 2011 after making rude comments about a teacher on Facebook. As Mashable reported at the time, the incident prompted a response from an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who argued that the student's free speech rights were violated and that the school broke federal and state laws.
Related
Before You Go
