The dust still hasn't settled for students at Scarborough's Birchmount Park Collegiate after last week's student suspension over comments made on Facebook.com.
Toronto District School Board officials met Monday with 16-year-old Brad Parsons, the student who set up the message board on the networking site where students posted derogatory comments about their vice-principal.
Parsons and four other students were suspended last week for periods spanning anywhere from five to 20 days.
As of Monday night, Parsons still hadn't heard the school board's decision on what they would do with him. There is a possibility he will be expelled.
"If they're going to expel me I'm going to try and find a new school and get on with my education and my life," Parsons told The Globe and Mail.
The comments posted on the networking site are considered an act of cyber-bullying, for which the school has a zero tolerance policy.
A support rally for the suspended students was also held last Friday. The rally turned violent and four students were charged with a variety of offenses including obstructing a peace officer, causing a disturbance and assault with a weapon. They are scheduled to appear in court this week.
The teens say that being punished over "private" online comments is a violation of their freedom of speech.
Facebook says they do everything they can to prevent abuse, this includes having a clear set of content rules, complaint-reporting links and having users use their real names.
Due to the high volume of clients though, the company relies heavily on self-policing.
"We've made a decision as a host of this information to not allow those types of personal attacks, (and) we deter them by expecting accountability," Facebook's chief privacy officer Chris Kelly told The Globe.
"But we also have terms of service that allow us to remove those from the site, and when those are reported, we do that."
As for a school faced with a situation like Birchmount, "the school has to apply their own rules, and our view on that is sort of irrelevant at the end of the day," he said.
Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne says she isn't prepared to set a policy for school boards with regards to social networking sites.
She says she would like to learn more about the technology by speaking with tech-savvy students and establish guidelines for acceptable behaviour, The Globe reports.
Wynne said a number of groups in the province, such as the Ontario Public School Boards' Association, are looking to develop recommendations on how to handle issues around abusive language in online forums. Individual boards will be left to develop their own policies.
Kelly told the newspaper he has been following the Birchmount story but wouldn't comment on whether Facebook took action.
"Let's just say that abuse on the site is taken very seriously, and we have a three-strikes-and-you're-out policy when it comes to posting inappropriate content."
