The Case of Brandon Beussink: A First Step Towards Precedence

Though the

Paul Kim controversy created a vigorous, yet brief debate in the education community, his case was by no means the last. In February 1998, 17-year-old Brandon Beussink of Marble Hill, Missouri was also disciplined by his school for creating a Web site from home. Beussink's conspicuously immature site used vulgar language to criticize his school's official homepage, and egged on students to email school officials and protest the quality of the homepage. Within days of creating the site, school officials ordered him to take it off the Internet. Beussink acquiesced to their demands in hopes of not being punished, but administrators nonetheless suspended him for 10 days and flunked him for the semester, preventing him from graduating on time.

In a well-publicized ruling that was issued in December 1998, U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel sided with Beussink and issued an injunction against the school district, ordering it not to hold the suspension against Beussink when calculating grades or school absences, and restricting the district from interfering with Beussink's online publishing. Not unlike the arguments made by Paul Kim's ACLU attorneys, Judge Sippel cited the Tinker case in his reasoning. "Disliking or being upset by the content of a student's speech is not an acceptable justification for limiting student speech under Tinker," he wrote in the injunction.

Judge Sippel went on to write the following: