ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996 TAG: 9609090065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
For Daniel Green Jr., the problems began in the spring with a creative writing project that he now says was too creative.
His freshman English teacher at Fauquier High School had told students to use words and art to illustrate life's many passages, so Daniel used a collage of gritty photos of guns and barely clad women, and the words of ``gangsta'' rap songs to portray the lives of urban black youths.
In a written introduction, labeled ``Tha opening,'' he addressed his teacher in highly profane language that mimicked rap songs and ended with a phrase that school officials interpreted as sexually menacing: ``So take it and like it, or you can get the [expletive], bTreating the paper as a threat, the Fauquier County School Board suspended Daniel for 10 days. Last week, Daniel asked the U.S. District Court in Alexandria to overturn the suspension and take it off his record, contending that the punishment violated his First Amendment right of academic expression.
School officials ``asked me what I was doing and told me they thought I was going to hurt somebody,'' said Daniel, now a 15-year-old sophomore, adding that he never intended to threaten anyone. ``They made me out to be some thuglike kid.''
Civil rights lawyers said schools can give bad grades for unacceptable schoolwork or suspend students for words and behavior that cause disruption. But they said the Bill of Rights protects students from being disciplined for schoolwork they do.
``I literally cannot imagine a more-protected form of free speech,'' said Kent Willis, executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union's Virginia chapter. ``It's the ultimate paradox to punish a student for what he writes in a creative writing class.''
School officials declined to discuss Daniel's complaint. They said that in recent years, the Fauquier school system has sought to stamp out any suggestion of danger to teachers.
Daniel, one of three black students in a 30-member gifted-and-talented English class, lives in tiny, mostly white Hume. He drew the information for his project on urban youth from magazine advertisements and rap CDs.
In an interview Thursday, Daniel, who plays basketball and sings in a church choir, said the introduction to his paper was fiction, intended to jolt readers with a sense of urban harshness. The project also included a personal account of his grandmother's death and writings from Langston Hughes.
Daniel's mother, Darlene Green, said she found the paper offensive and grounded her son. But Green, a mental-health counselor, said school officials should have treated it as an academic blunder.
``They should have given him a chance to rewrite it,'' Green said. ``Someone should have used it as a chance to teach him. I told the school officials, `I think you're overreacting.'''
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