Amy Hestir Davis bill goes in wrong direction

Friday was the deadline for the final draft of the civil rights research paper I assigned students in my eighth grade communication arts class at South Middle School each year.

For the past several days, I have received research papers and bibliographies from students, with more than 50 of them coming via e-mail. When I was home writing on The Turner Report, working on some outside writing, and preparing for the next day of school, I kept my MySpace account on-line, because I knew that even though the students know my e-mail address, e-mail is a bit old fashioned to many of them. Over the past few days, I have received more than four dozen MySpace messages from students asking questions about deadlines, how to do their bibliographies, how to properly cite sources, or even questions concerning grammar.

MySpace is a quick, efficient way to deal with those questions, and to me, far more preferable than phone calls.

I am far from the only teacher in the state of Missouri, southwest Missouri, or even the Joplin R-8 School District, to have a MySpace account. In an era where it has become more important than ever to be able to communicate with students and parents, it is important that teachers use every method at their disposal to do so.

Unfortunately, a bill sponsored by Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, (with a Senate version offered by Sen. Victor Callahan, D-Independence) will deprive teachers of that means of communications.

Most of HB 1314, the Amy Hestir Davis Student Protection Act, which has already passed the House and had its first reading in the Senate, provides necessary protections for students from predatory teachers. Among its co-sponsors are Rep. Marilyn Ruestman, R-Joplin, and Rep. Bryan Stevenson, R-Webb City. The bill calls for some checks that have been needed for some time. It prohibits "passing the trash," the system that has enabled some predatory teachers to move from one school district to another if they will leave quietly after incidents (make that crimes) occur. The bill also adds needed legal protection for those who report teacher indiscretions with students.

The portion of the bill that would prohibit teachers from maintaining MySpace accounts to which students have access was added in the House Education Committee, which is chaired by Ms. Ruestman. Undoubtedly, there have been predatory teachers who have taken advantage of students with the help of these so-called social networking sites, but that number is probably less than one-tenth of one percent of teachers who maintain MySpace or Facebook accounts.

There will be those who say that even that miniscule amount is enough to warrant the prohibition (the old if it saves just one student, it is worth it argument).

But let me frame the argument in another way. Each year, thousands of people are killed or wounded by handguns in the United States. If we removed all handguns from circulation, whether it be from criminals or law-abiding citizens, we could cut down on that problem. After all, if one life can be saved, it would be worth it.

Anyone posing that argument would be savagely attacked, and the proposal would go nowhere.

Government should not be placing restrictions on law-abiding citizens. In the case of the gun argument, such a proposal would fly in the face of the Second Amendment. The MySpace portion of the Amy Hestir Davis Student Protection Act, is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

Banning teachers from communicating with students through MySpace is not going to have any effect whatsoever on predatory teachers. These people know how to zero in on the vulnerabilities of their victims and have far greater weapons than MySpace at their disposal.

The primary goal of this legislation is to get these teachers out of the classroom. If that is done, their access to children is gone. Don't punish the good teachers, who are doing their best to find ways to legitimately communicate with their students for educational purposes by lumping us in the same category as these disgusting predators who have disgraced our profession.