November 6, 2006
Monday

I attended a special meeting of the Derry Township School Board tonight. Derry Township (known to most by its more familiar names of Hershey, Pennsylvania, the Chocolate Crossroads of the World, and the Sweetest Place on Earth) is not the township where I live and where Lynn went to school, but the reason for the special meeting captured my imagination, so I went, NaBloPoMo participant’s notebook in hand.

It seems that Jonathan Keeler, a thirty-six-year-old township resident elected to his first term as school director last year, had garnered some unwanted attention for, among other things, his Internet presence on MySpace, a social networking site popular among people in their late teens who have outgrown Xanga but also used by artists, musicians, and filmmakers. In the early part of November the school board received an e-mail message at its general address suggesting that the members might want to take a look at Keeler’s site, since the message writer (an unidentified citizen whose children attend the school) found some of the content disturbing.

Keeler doesn’t use his MySpace space as a blogging tool, only for social purposes. He’d filled in only his list of interests (which included “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll!!!”) and some answers to a set of questions in an “About Me” section. There, the reader learned that Keeler’s wife “likes the skin flute,” that he would like to participate in a “threesome,” that his worst habit is masturbation, and that he would like to meet “Katherine Harris naked.” (Katherine Harris is a US Congresswoman from Florida currently running for the US Senate. As Florida’s Secretary of State in 2000 she became well-known for her role in supervising the contested US presidential election.) He also included a picture of President Bush giving the finger to a news crew.

The meeting was called to discuss Keeler’s recent conduct and to consider what, if any, action should be taken because of it. According to the newspaper article that announced the special meeting, there were other issues between Keeler and the board he had sought to serve. There was an incident last spring in which he failed to attend a scheduled meeting but spent the time in his car on the parking lot drinking nonalcoholic beer. (Possession of nonalcoholic beer on school property is prohibited by that school board’s policy.) There were also some local political flaps involving Keeler’s support or nonsupport of local candidates that I really don’t know very much about.

About fifty people and two local news crews showed up for the meeting. (This is about ten times the number of people and two more news crews than are usually at a school board meeting.) Spectators were given handouts containing screen shots of Keeler’s MySpace content and also the emails that he had sent to the complaining citizen in which he lectured her about his free speech rights and threatened her with unspecified retaliation if she continued her call for investigation.

Two parents (both men) who spoke at the beginning of the meeting both expressed outrage that such disturbing material was freely available to their children, and they spoke passionately about their belief that anyone who could post such content certainly didn’t represent their family values. I knew that though they were very sincere, they were going at the problem from the wrong angle. Keeler does have free speech rights, and most content on the Internet is available to anyone.

As it happened, the meeting lasted only a half hour, because Keeler (who wasn’t there) had resigned his position just before the meeting began, and so there was nothing to discuss. He said he believed that his content on MySpace was perfectly acceptable even though it differed from what he termed the “puritanical” norms of the township, and that he had rights under the First Amendment to post it. He said he meant the whole thing to be “a joke” to entertain his friends. (Yeah, right.) But he also said he was withdrawing from the Derry Township School Board because his wife did not want to participate in an investigation into the site’s propriety. (I guess she didn’t want to have to testify about her skill with the skin flute.)

Keeler is obviously an immature individual who does not understand what it means to be a public servant. The school board issued a statement saying that while the First Amendment does grant citizens rights to free speech, it does not grant them immunity from criticism over what they say.

Those of us who put ourselves on the Web in our online journals and blogs certainly need to understand this.

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