High School Senior Expelled For Swearing in Tweet (Video)

by Mary C Long 

If you’re in high school and you post a tweet (from home) that’s full of f-bombs should you be expelled from school? 


That’s the question at the heart of this controversy, but the details will surprise you. 

​Austin Carroll is a high school senior finishing out the year at a new school because he was expelled from Garret High School in Indiana for posting a tweet that went something like this: “Blank is one of those blanking words you can blanking put anywhere in a blanking sentence and it still blanking makes sense.”

The tweet was posted on his personal twitter account, which is not associated with the school. He wasn’t harassing anyone. He wasn’t saying anything about the school. And he wasn’t at school or using a school computer when he posted it – though there’s a bit of confusion around that last point as the school claims he used a school computer when he posted the tweet . . . at 2:30 in the morning. Hmm. 

According to this video below, the school has a system that tracks all student tweets and even if he did tweet from home, the system would have recognized it when he logged in at school. 

Austin claims he was trying to be funny and that does seem plausible. And although his mom doesn’t agree with the language, she states (in the video) that expelling her son three months before the end of the year was excessive. Could they have suspended him instead and let him finish out the last few months of his senior year? What do you think?  

IMAGE CREDIT: PINKYCOLOGNE

This post originally appeared on AdWeek/Social Times