In the world of high school, perhaps the worst sin of all is gluttony: You can cheat, lie, steal or generally carry on like a bad seed, and you'll most likely end up the toast of the prom. But should you be so bold as to demand an extra piece of pie -- especially at an unhip eatery like Sizzler -- your reputation is sure to go to pot.
This bit of wisdom was gleaned from Diamond Ranch High School News, a gossip site run by a few students who, until recently, attended Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, California.
The site, not sanctioned by the school, functions as a kind of supermarket tabloid for 21st-century adolescents. They spot something untoward -- in this case, "Joel D." at the local Sizzler, yelling "What do you mean you don't have pie?!" -- and they e-mail the item to the site, which has a policy of putting up any news that doesn't seem completely implausible.
"I always thought that this was going around school anyway," said Danny Fuentes, creator of the site. "I provide a tool for people to talk to each other. Instead of face-to-face fighting, they can do it over the Internet, so there's no way they can duke it out right there on your computer. So I think every school should have one of these."
In its year online, DRHS News has become a sensation at Diamond Ranch, getting students riled up over the rumored transgressions of its students. It's not only about eating too much pie: The site's gossip page details the sexual escapades of cheerleaders, the drunken episodes of teachers and dozens of other situations of a mostly prurient variety.
Its "news" is immature, cruel and probably mostly untrue -- which makes it both disquieting and irresistible. Adolescents, to a slightly greater degree than most other humans, love to tear each other down, and if they can do it easily and anonymously through the Internet, so much the better.
It's no surprise, then, that DRHS News is not alone in this game. According to scattered news reports from all over the United States, kids are using the Internet to tease, bully or just generally harass each other -- and, in some cases, their teachers as well. And although parents and some fellow students are outraged by such sites, legal experts say that students who engage in online torment are doing nothing wrong -- that such nuisances are simply to be expected in a free society.
Last June, The New Yorker reported that parents of students attending several upper-crust New York private schools were up in arms over a page at Freevote.com, which allowed kids to vote for "the biggest ho (be them female or male)" in the area.
The magazine said of the site: "More than 13,000 votes had been cast (though participants could vote more than once, making it impossible to tell how many voters there had been). Many of the students listed were identified by school and grade, as well as by various colorful, but not very tasteful remarks...: 'da one from chapin,' 'the Fendi Bitch,' 'green skirt, she's super fast!' 'will do anything to you for moldy bread,' 'however you spell her name ... u know she's a hoe,' 'p.s. the head rocked,' and 'damn skanky.'"
Charles Hynes, Brooklyn's district attorney, was alerted of the site, but he determined that nothing about it was illegal. Still, his office contacted Freevote, which took down the page.
A more troubling case involved Derek Dubois, a 14-year-old student at Cumberland High School in Rhode Island, who was suspended last spring after school officials discovered the sleazy serenade to a middle school English teacher he'd recorded and posted on Napster.
According to comments he made to The Providence Journal-Bulletin, Dubois had always been musically inclined, but he unfortunately has a rather poor singing voice: When he recorded a version of Incubus' "Pardon Me" and posted it on Napster, his friends teased him about his crooning.
"My voice is awful because I can't sing," Dubois told the Journal-Bulletin in April. "So I felt I needed to prove to them that I could play."
He came up with the idea of a "joke song" about Mrs. Dunn, a teacher he'd had at his middle school. "Singing doesn't matter if it's a joke song," he told the paper.
Although it might have been a joke, the song was not at all funny. In a creepy, scratchy half-whisper, he sings his mostly unprintable fantasies regarding this teacher. Among the cleaner lyrics are: "I'll be the pimp, yeah, and you be the whore," and, "when I see you, I fall into a rage, I really don't care you're double my age."
Before he knew it, Dubois' song became the talk of the school, and when Howard Stern played some snippets on his radio show, it became national news. The song -- still available at song-trading sites -- so jarred the teacher that she took a leave of absence, and Dubois was charged by school authorities with violating sexual harassment policies.
The Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union joined Dubois in his defense, arguing that the school has no right to punish students for their actions off school grounds.
This is a frequent point of contention between schools and students. Probably as long as there have been students, they have been saying things that school authorities do not much care for -- everything from expressions of discontent muttered in hallways to organized protests to harsh criticisms (of the school) in the school newspaper.
Except for a few cases, courts have held that a student's speech outside of school is beyond the reach of administrators, according to Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center.
"Absent physical threat, the courts have said that the remedy is an outside-school remedy," he said, "through parents, a civil suit or law enforcement entities."
But this defense apparently does not always hold up. After a long legal battle, Rhode Island's department of education last week upheld Dubois' suspension, saying that the song's proliferation on the Internet made it impossible to ignore.
The student "posted it on the Internet (and thereby) extended the ramifications of his conduct far beyond the computer at his home," the department wrote in its hearing.
There is no word yet on whether Dubois will accept the punishment or fight back in court.
But Fuentes, the creator of the Diamond Ranch High School site (who until now has been anonymous), is undeterred. He used a similar defense against administrators at his school when they tried to shut down his site, and he still insists that schools have no power over students' speech.
After administrators succeeded in getting his ISP to close down the site twice, Fuentes posted a message saying, "The DRHS News Team would like to start off by saying that you will not be able to shut down our website any more. We have spoken with lawyers and have done a fair amount of research."
He thinks that "the school should not be involved in the Net at all," because he "doesn't use any of the school resources. It's an outside-of-school thing."
More to the point, though, Fuentes insisted that he's doing nothing wrong. The fact of the matter is, people like gossip, and they're going to take stabs at each other even if there is no Internet, he said.
"I think I'm helping people out," he said. "I try to keep the gossip at stage one. Normally, at the beginning of the day a story could be 'Johnny and Suzy were kissing,' and at the end of the day, it's 'Johnny and Suzy were having a foursome.' My site keeps the story straight."
What if Johnny and Suzy were neither kissing nor having an orgy? Fuentes said that if either asks him, he'd take down the item.
Fuentes, who has graduated from Diamond Ranch, but will hand down the site to another anonymous student, was recently invited to be a guest on the Sally Jessy Raphael daytime talk show. The episode has already been taped, and it will air in a few weeks.
But you needn't watch it to get the scoop, as Fuentes was ready to give the lowdown on Sally: "She really treated me like crap on the show," he said. "She cut me off every five seconds. Sally's really rude."
