Digiteen

The class listened as Mr. Jenkins read a story about a girl who got annoyed when her parents quizzed her about details from her online journal. Lucas Navarrete, 13, asked, “What’s their right to read her personal stuff?” “Maybe they’re worried,” suggested Morgan Windham, a soft-spoken girl. “It’s public!” argued Aren Santos. “O.K., O.K., if it was a personal diary and they read it, would you be happy?” Lucas asked. “They have no right, see?” Mr. Jenkins asked the class if there is a difference between a private diary on paper and a public online diary. But the class could not agree. “I would just keep it to myself and tell only people that were really, really close to me,” Cindy Nguyen said after class. “We want to have our personal, private space.” That blurred line between public and private space is what Common Sense tries to address. “That sense of invulnerability that high school students tend to have, thinking they can control everything, before the Internet there may have been some truth to that,” said Ted Brodheim, chief information officer for the New York City Department of Education. “I don’t think they fully grasp that when they make some of these decisions, it’s not something they can pull back from.”

And the Internet is where children are growing up. The average young person spends seven and a half hours a day with a computer, television or smart phone, according to a January study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Considering that the time is mostly outside of school, the results suggest that almost every extracurricular hour is devo

“You want to light a fire under someone’s fanny?” said Liz Perle, editor in chief of Common Sense Media. “Have your child post something that is close to a hate crime.”

“The messes they get into with friends, or jumping onto someone’s site and sending a message,” she said. “They don’t know, sometimes, how to manage the social, emotional stuff that comes up.”

"We’re in the very first generation of this and there’s nothing ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear," said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Virginia-based Student Press Law Center.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Florida federal court, concerns Katherine Evans, now 19, who was suspended as a senior last year after creating a Facebook group devoted to her English teacher. The group was called "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever met!," and featured a photograph of the teacher, and an invitation for other students to "express your feelings of hatred." After people’s comments derided Evans for the online stunt, and expressed support for the teacher, she deleted the group. But Pembroke Pines Charter High School, which did not respond for comment, suspended Evans for three days for "disruptive behavior" and for "Bullying / Cyber Bullying Harassment towards a staff member," according to the lawsuit, which is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The lawsuit (.pdf) is one of about a dozen across the United States that are part of the fallout as schools confront cyberbullying and the explosion of social networking sites. A Texas high school volleyball coach in September went so far as to declare a ban on student Facebook and MySpace profiles, a decision the Northside Independent School District reversed (.pdf). Last month, Tennessee State University blocked the online gossip site JuicyCampus at the school firewall. In June, Missouri enacted a law against "cyberbullying" in the wake of the Megan Meier suicide tragedy, which was triggered by a hoax MySpace account.

There’s no bright-line rule on what constitutes free, student speech in the online world. And as schools start to regulate off-campus student speech on the internet, lawsuits are following.

A friend who did not want to be identified told CBS News, "She was being bullied because she was pretty and people were just jealous."Prince's classmate also said he was one of her closest friends, but she never revealed her pain.

Meline Kevorkian, the author of "101 Facts About Bullying" told CBS News, "Cyber-bullying can be so dangerous because it can lead to cyber-mobbing, which means kids can come together to attack another kid, 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Prince's unidentified friend said, "It just makes me sad that it takes the life of a young teenager who had everything going for her to bring the community together to have them realize how bad bullying is."

kids should "know that they are loved and that people care about them, and they can make it through this."