Agreeing or disagreeing with this statement is a hard thing to decide on, this is the gray area. Any given school is going to have different rules, and although freedom of speech is a right, should someone be able to wear a shirt with beer cans on it? It’s hard enough defining a gray area in the first place, let alone agreeing. However, I do think that if a shirt portrays something illegal or has hate speech, it should not be allowed. But here comes another problem, what is considered hate-speech? This gray area is so hard to define. Schools should be able to control it to a point where no one is offended, as long as people who are expressing their opinions do it in a respectable way. Although this is a gray area, student safety should come first, but physical safety isn’t always number one. I’m going in circles because I don’t know what I think.
The first example, that I’m sure everyone is thinking, is the Sydney Spies yearbook photo drama. Should the school have been able to not print her photo? It is a school yearbook, and she was out of dress-code, but does that give the school the right to take away her personal freedom of expressing her desires to be a model? What if she would have been in dress-code, but been in a bar? This gray area thing is driving me crazy. Another example that comes to mind is a persons right to own a gun. Can someone who’s 18 have a gun in school? If they are allowed to own it, and their personal rights say they can have a gun, why can’t they at a public school? It all comes down to the safety of the general public and weather or not what’s happening is a threat to that.
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