ShawneeDispatch.com

Parents of some Trailridge Middle School students are concerned the first amendment rights of their students are being violated.

At a "meet the board" session for Shawnee Mission schools Monday night, a group of parents voiced their concerns about the investigation into a threat against a teacher last week at Trailridge. Parents say that the school overstepped its bounds by punishing a student who made a verbal threat to a teacher on an online blog site.

Joanne McNair, a Shawnee parent of a Trailridge student, said she's concerned the district is overreacting to student threats.

"We're talking about children making threats," she said. "How many of us here have said something that can be taken as a threat? Do we mean them literally? Of course not. Words are usually just words."

Marge Kaplan, superintendent of schools, said parents needed to educate students on the openness of their online dairies.

"Let your children know this is not the right kind of behavior," she said. "Threats could be considered very serious. Our responsibility is to try to protect our children."

Kaplan noted that after the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, school administrators in Colorado were criticized for not taking threats by students seriously. McNair said administrators should take the students' prior record into account when determining if the threat is real.

"A lot of our kids have been in Shawnee Mission schools for nine years, so you have nine years of records to tell you whether the student is capable of a threat or not," she said.

Kaplan said psychological studies show that violent behavior is often unpredictable, especially in youth.

Holly Nelson, teacher at Trailridge, said she was glad the district had taken action on the threat.

Parents told board members some of their children are choosing to shut down their online diary sites. They said one of the most popular sites is Xanga. On a Xanga blog collection ring for Shawnee Mission Northwest, 648 users are listed as members. Similar sites for Shawnee Mission North have more than 200 users.

Kaplan said because sites like Xanga, My Space and Face Book are blocked from all Shawnee Mission school computers, faculty don't regularly monitor students' Web sites. However, parents who monitor their students' sites have come to administrators with concern about specific threats. She said if the school were notified of such a threat, they would call the police.

"We have a very serious, high level of responsibility taking care of 30,000 children," she said. "We can't always discriminate between one threat or another threat. We've told them they're not supposed to make threats on the Internet."