The New School Suspension: Blocked From Online Classrooms
Audrey Taito, a rising fourth-grader in Sacramento, California, can’t say exactly what she did to get her school email account blocked in the spring. She’s only 9. Online learning was new to her, and she found the technology confusing. Her teacher and school principal say she bombarded the district’s tech support department with requests, but she doesn’t remember it like that. She thinks she might have sent too many messages to a friend in a private chatroom, triggering some sort of automatic spam response.
She does remember the shame and confusion she felt when her teacher wrote to her indicating that she was in trouble, and that she would hate to have to mute Audrey’s account. Later, her email account was blocked.
Audrey worried that she had been suspended from school, even while at home.
“I don’t want to go back to school because they embarrass me a lot,” Audrey, who attends elementary school in the Sacramento City Unified School District, said while snuggling up against her mother, Rashida Dunn-Nasr, a professional caregiver, and rubbing her face into a blanket. She and her mother spoke to HuffPost via Zoom.
The district blocked Audrey’s email account for only about two hours “after inappropriate emails were sent to our district IT staff from the account,” wrote spokesperson Tara Gallegos. Audrey could still participate in other online learning activities. However, email exchanges between Dunn-Nasr and the district show that she was never told when Audrey’s email privileges would be restored, and Audrey says she had difficulty submitting assignments for weeks after.
As many schools around the country plan to start remotely in the coming weeks, the incident is representative of how districts around the country are grappling with school discipline from afar. Some are dealing with incidents of misbehavior on a case-by-case basis, others are adding addendums to their typical codes of conduct that specifically address online...
