School Law: Dawson V. East Term Paper

The court easily could have come to a contrary result, given that it denied most of the allegations of the plaintiff, other than the specific contention that the nature of this specific advertising was particularly inconsistent with state educational statues and school board policy. Even the plaintiff conceded that advertising in the form of school vending machines, yearbooks, sports scorecards, etc. had long been tolerated in schools, and would continue to be tolerated.

Question 2: What guidelines may administrators who are considering potential educational uses of commercially driven Internet technology draw from the above opinion?

The guidelines for school administers regarding advertising thus remain blurry. Video advertising is acceptable, but not the type of video advertising on Channel One. Regarding Internet advertising, it would seem that using the Internet to research material on websites where advertising may appear would be analogous to the permissible practice of taping programs from the television for use in the classroom. Also, the court noted that using material from magazines and newspapers would similarly 'run the risk' of exposing student to outside, nonobjective advertising content but were still acceptable.

What seemed to cross the line, however, was the combination of the invasiveness of the non-educational content into the curriculum, and the unavoidability of the advertising. It was not clearly non-curricular and non-educational like an advertisement on a sports jersey or an advertisement featured in a school program. Nor was the advertisement from another extracurricular source like a non-scholastically presented television advertisement.

Thus, the main guideline would seem to be that school administrators should avoid requiring students to view commercial content on the school's website when researching an assignment, like an advertisement on a class webpage for an English class as opposed to an advertisement on a page devoted to school sports or extracurricular notices. This practice would appear to endorse the products as educationally valid. This would be particularly true of required video Internet material, which unlike written Internet content cannot be easily ignored on the page while the student is researching an educational portion of an assignment, and thus is more invasive in…