Spreading the news

Six students from a high school in Fredrikstad were recently expelled because of a relatively innocent prank.

The students removed the hinges of a classroom door, causing it to fall on the teacher when she entered the classroom. More or less innocent, and kind of fun if you're not too old to remember what it was like being in high school. The problem is that the prank didn't stay in the classroom. A student filmed it with his mobile phone, and spread the video via MMS. The school reacted to this by expelling six of the students as well as reporting it to the police. A reaction many believe is far too extreme.

It was, after all, just an innocent prank. But when students started spreading the video the incident changed from an innocent highschool prank into something far more serious. People need to learn that when they put things online, they loose control over it. Even something as innocent as this blog post can come back to haunt me for reasons I still don't know about. In that context I can understand why the school chose to go to the police.

But I still feel that going to the police was unnecessary. The school has to live with these students even after the commotion has settled, and could have solved the problem by more tradtionial means, such as talking to parents. By their reaction, the school shows that it was not prepared for the consequences of the information age.