An Examination of Ohio Principals’ Attitudes toward Technology and First Amendment Law: Implications for Leadership

Abstract

Principals have acknowledged the challenges with remaining current on issues in the law. A unique challenge for principals is the intersection of students’ First Amendment rights in the school context and the legal issues surrounding student-created webpages. Using a randomly selected sample of Ohio high school secondary principals, I investigated administrators’ attitudes concerning the scope of their authority in regulating student Internet expression (i.e., webpages). In this study, attitudes are defined as a predisposition to respond to a social object, such as a person, group, idea, physical object, and so on, in particular situations. The results revealed that principals’ attitudes were significantly affected by the place where the student's webpage was created (on campus or off campus) but not by the presence or absence of a material disruption.