The problem is not a new one. But, the magnitude of what happened this year when 7th and 8th graders at Great Valley Middle School in Chester County, Pa. decided to weaponize Tik-Tok to attack their teachers seems unprecedented.
The Great Valley Middle School is located in the heart of Philadelphia’s wealthy suburbs. Although some nearby districts rates higher, Great Valley is a place where houses cost extra because the school system is extraordinary. The intelligence of the children can be measured by the depravity of their conduct. We should add these are but a few of the 1,000 students but when some of those students manufacture bad news about the faculty, that news travels fast, especially in a world where conflicts over class size, curriculum and academic expectations have already made for a toxic mix of conflict between parents, students, teachers and administration.
The New York Times and other media outlets reports that the students uploaded photos of their teachers and family members. Then they began to edit these with content suggesting the faculty members engaged in illegal and other inappropriate behavior which could, if true, cost them their employment and their futures as teachers. Predatory behavior, homophobic behavior, racist behavior were all presented on TikTok as if true. The students saw it as amusing in a world where it has become accepted to address the governors of American states as “New Scum,” “Bird brain” and “DeSanctimonius”
The topic of the day is “Who is responsible?” And the answer is, we all are. This is conduct we have come to tolerate. And to some, this is conduct that an element of our society wants to celebrate. But, there is another question at large. Who is liable for this misbehavior? That’s a more challenging question.
Pennsylvania has a weird “parent responsibility” law passed in 1994. It is long on language and short on remedies. 23 Pa.C.S. 5502 says parents can be legally liable for the damage their children cause but the limit of liability is $1,000-2,500. Section 5505.
But that does not prevent an injured person from proceeding with a lawsuit against the child. In the past the conventional wisdom saw this as a waste of energy. Children rarely have any resources to pay a judgment, so what was the point? Even 529 accounts and UTMA accounts established for the children are not their property when created.
Again, however, we live in a new dawn and a new day. These teachers have rights to sue the children for the defamation they seem to have committed. And while they may not have resources to pay a judgment today, tomorrow or in the foreseeable future, a judgment recorded against that child can be renewed indefinitely. A child in that situation will never be able to acquire a house, a car or maintain a bank account without that judgment looming and needing to be addressed. If that child someday received an inheritance, the judgment creditor will be able to recover the judgment together with 6% interest from the day it was entered. Thus the “judgment” will double in value every twelve years.
We don’t let children who are 12-14 operate cars. But a computer keyboard can be just as destructive to the lives of others when committed to the unsupervised control of a kid. If we allow children to operate devices that can inflict lasting harm, someone needs to be responsible. The goal here is not to inflict harm on the children. We all know that their judgment is flawed by their youth and inexperience. However, it is not enough to dismiss truly harmful aberrant behavior on the basis of age alone. After all, these children knew they were inflicting harm. They just didn’t understand how grave the harm was.
The law has a doctrine called “negligent entrustment.” Ordinarily, I am not personally responsible for the negligence of my child. But, if I know my 13 year old is taking my car and driving to town to run arrands and I allow this, I have negligently entrusted my car to someone legally incapacitated to drive a car. For that, I may be held liable even though it was my 13 year old and not me who struck and killed a pedestrian crossing the street.
The Great Valley Incidents of 2024 prove that unmonitored computers can inflict immense harm as well. Here, grave harm has been inflicted on our fellow citizens who try their best to educate our kids. We would all like to talk about the need to support our educators. But we do it in the abstract. The harm we have seen cannot be dismissed as the whimsical acts of children. In this case adults are victims. But we also know that computers are contributing to the reality that suicide has become the second leading cause of death among children in the grades (7-8) these children attend. This is not Great Valley’s problem. It is “our” problem and it needs to be addressed by forcing parents to control computer access. The benefit of these devices to our world cannot be overstated. We are only beginning to grasp their power to inflict both fleeting and permanent harm.