According to the Student Press Law Center's CyberGuide, one of the first times school officials took action against a student for an independent Web site (a site not run or accessed by school computers) was in 1995 in Bellevue, Wash., when Paul Kim, a senior honors student, created "The Newport High School Unofficial Homepage." The site contained talk about sex and football that administrators found offensive.

Upon learning about the site, the school's principal contacted the National Merit Foundation and the colleges to which Kim had applied, asking them to rescind the school's letters of recommendation. This case never went to court: When Kim threatened a lawsuit, the school issued a formal apology, paid him $2,000 and reinstated his recommendations.

Since then, courts have upheld students' rights to publish all sorts of offensive content on home computers -- including a site that showed school administrators in simulated sex acts; one that showed a teacher morphing into Hitler; and one that contained a "Graffiti Wall," which encouraged students to post comments about students they didn't like. (All of these cases can be viewed in more detail on the Web site of the Student Press Law Center.)

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"Off-campus speech has generally been considered censorship-proof," according to the CyberGuide, though "it can be little consolation to students that academic sanctions and disciplinary punishments doled out by overzealous and misinformed administrators are often overturned or settled months or years later -- long after academic damage has been done and legal bills have piled up." It may also be little consolation for a student who is being attacked by another on an off-site message board to know that neither the school nor the police can intervene on their behalf before their reputation is completely trashed online.

Michael Carr, a spokesman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, says that it should be common knowledge among school principals that they do not have jurisdiction over students' off-campus speech -- though the relative novelty of the Internet means that some administrators have not learned this yet. What's more, Carr points out, there is no national consensus on what constitutes harassment on school grounds: "I don't foresee us ever setting a definition of harassment. That's for local school boards to decide. And it's still subjective. Even at the local level, you're going to have a debate going on."

In an interview with the New York Times, Donald Parker, superintendent of the Chappaqua Central School District, defended the decision to call the police to arrest the boys responsible for posting personal information about other students. "It's just not appropriate to put information about people on a Web site. We all realize that, since Columbine, things have changed."

None of the Chappaqua comments have been released to the public, but it seems like a panicky stretch to equate raunchy dating tips along the lines of "Sally sleeps around" with comments that indicate an intention to murder other students, as in, "I'm going to go to school tomorrow and bash Sally's head in with this mace which I've bought for this purpose." One is mean, personally devastating and perhaps grounds for a civil suit; the other is mean, personally terrifying and perhaps the grounds for criminal charges, if it can be generally surmised that it is a "true threat" -- that is, a threat specific enough to qualify as a description of a future action, and not simply hyperbole.

Parents and students can and do sue school districts for failure to protect kids who are being harassed on school grounds; but the problem in this spring's three cases of cyber-bullying is that even if the students' behavior met the legal definition of harassment, it did not take place at school. And although the girls who were the focus of the comments might have the basis for libel suits in civil court, the boys who were suspended could also have the makings of a civil lawsuit against the school.

"In this case [Horace Greeley High School], the principal probably overstepped the law in suspending the students," says Hiestand of the Student Press Law Center. "It's a matter between the student who posted the item and the student about whom comments were made. It's unfortunate that the police didn't realize before the district attorney was brought in that we are talking about speech here, and we don't arrest people for speech, unless the speech involves a clear threat. Sexual comments about another student do not constitute a clear threat. They can be offensive, they can even rise to the level of libel, but those kinds of matters are dealt with in civil court."

Indeed, in the case of the student whose Web site featured a photograph of his teacher's face morphing into Hitler, the criminal charges were dismissed, but a jury later awarded the teacher $200,000 in damages after a defamation suit in civil court.

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