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Judi Sohn, the mother of a girl whose special needs she claims were not being met by her daughter's school, reports that the school has used her blog postings against her in legal proceedings. Was Sohn treated fairly? We don't really have enough evidence to say, but Sohn's case is a fascinating one.
I'm going to quote at length from Sohn's post as a way of summarizing her story:
In January 2007, I was still hoping that we could find a way for Laini to be emotionally successful in the public school. I was becoming more vocal about my dissatisfaction at meetings and I started seeking private therapy services and evaluations, but I had not spoken to or hired an attorney, and at that point I wasn’t thinking for a moment that we would be sending Laini to a private school.
[...]
I thought I was helping the team. I was naive. Unbeknownst to me, school district personnel came to my blog in mid January 2007, searched out posts from 2005 and 2006 where I talked about my kids education, printed them out and placed them in a file somewhere. How do I know this? Because those very blog posts were taken out of context and presented as “evidence” against me in the hearing in December 2007/January 2008 where we sought to show that the district’s proposed program for Laini was inappropriate. I was able to tell from the sidebar of the printouts when they were printed.
We were seeking reimbursement for the private school, and we lost. We didn’t lose the decision because of the blog posts. There are other reasons that the hearing officer decided against us which aren’t necessary to elaborate. I have no idea if the hearing officer cared about the blog post because he never mentioned them in the decision, but I’m sure those words taken completely out of context didn’t help my case.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over the feeling of betrayal. I am not as upset about the blog posts being used in the hearing. That’s the chance you take when you expose parts of your personal life online. I am livid that those posts were printed out months before my disagreements with the school district turned ugly.
Making things more interesting is that Sohn is the editor of the popular site Web Worker Daily and the vice president of operations for a national nonprofit--a job she performs remotely, commuting via the web. That means she has a large online footprint; type her name into Google and you'll get 16,700 hits.
If you have been blogging for a while, or if you have a profile on several different social networking sites (FriendFeed, anyone?), anyone--as you well know by now--can find out a lot about you. I'm not going to fearmonger here; normally a large online presence doesn't present a problem, especially if you are always thinking about building your personal brand and are thus consistent in how you present yourself online.
And Sohn was trying to maintain a positive attitude (and, by extension, identity) online. After all, as she writes,
I have never ever posted anything negative about people who are working with my children. In fact, that was exactly the problem. They printed out my positive comments as evidence that I was thrilled about my daughter’s education, when the truth is that I made the conscious decision to only post the positive which isn’t the same thing.
One lesson many of us learn early on as bloggers is not to write negatively about others because doing so will eventually come back to bite us in the ass. And as women, we're often raised to be nice, to be polite. In Sohn's case, however, these cultural practices and norms have worked against her.
Damned if we do, damned if we don't. How can we advocate for family and our favorite causes if our words--negative or positive--are going to be taken out of context and used against us?
But there's a less general, more specific issue in Sohn's case: Why were school administrators reading her blog? Let's be charitable and say it was to get a better idea of her daughter's situation and needs. But then why print out only positive blog posts? That seems very much like a covering-their-ass tactic. And if you're a lawyer or a concerned administrator who's worried about a parent, that sounds like a reasonable thing to do.
Yet from a parent's perspective, it's kind
