Mocksville, NC - William Russell Shaver never thought that the MySpace page he shares with his wife would get him into trouble.

But it did.

Last year, he lost his job as a high-school bus driver for Davie County Schools and was asked to leave the Cooleemee Volunteer Fire Department, where he was a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician.

According to a letter provided by Shaver, the school system dismissed him because of his Web page of MySpace.com, saying that he had damaged his “position to be a role model for Davie High School and in the school community.”

The fire department won’t comment, but Shaver said that fire officials also cited his MySpace page when they asked him to leave.

He has sued in federal court, alleging that the school system and the fire department used his page as an excuse. He alleges that the real reason he was asked to leave both places is because he practices Wicca, a pagan religion that emphasizes nature.

“They had to find another excuse,” he said.

But experts say that increasingly, employers are looking at such social-networking sites as MySpace to vet job candidates. And employees have been fired over postings online, either in a blog, an e-mail or on a site such as MySpace.

Steve Lane, the superintendent for Davie County Schools, declined to comment, saying that Shaver’s dismissal is a personnel issue.

But Lane cited the school board’s policy that “all staff must serve as positive role models for our students.”

According to the complaint against the fire department, Shaver was dismissed during a special meeting on July 17, 2006, for conduct unbecoming a member of the department. The fire department told Shaver that his wife had a blog on the page that solicited sex, Shaver said. Shaver said that his wife is bisexual but was not soliciting sex.

In an April 30, 2006, blog entry on the page, Shaver’s wife says she is “looking for a bifemale to join me for some girls only fun (shopping, dancing or just hanging out with girls).”

It also warns readers to stop reading if they get offended. The title of the blog is “Adults and Bifemales Only.” And the category is “Romance and Relationships.”

Jennifer Rudinger, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in North Carolina, could not comment on Shaver’s lawsuits. But she did say that in general, employers are increasingly monitoring what their employees or prospective employees are doing on the Internet.

“Schools are monitoring what students communicate online, and the government is monitoring what law-abiding Americans everywhere are saying online,” Rudinger wrote in an e-mail response to a reporter’s questions. “All of this leads to a very chilling environment in which people are afraid that anything they say in cyberspace can be used against them, and this inhibits free speech on the Internet.”

The issue has come up in other places across the country. In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that San Diego officials were right to fire a police officer who sold sexually explicit videotapes of himself in uniform.

The man, known as John Roe in legal papers, claimed that his free-speech rights were being violated, but the ruling said that his speech was “detrimental to the mission and functions of the employer.”

Roe was fired in June 2001 after his supervisor discovered that the sex videos were being sold on eBay, an Internet auction site.

In another case, a Roanoke meteorologist was fired last November after his nude photo appeared on MySpace.

Shaver said he doesn’t understand what he did wrong. He said he once helped a student on his bus who was having seizures. “But I’m not a role model?” he said. “Basically, (the MySpace page) has nothing to do with the school.”
Source

• Hewlett, Michael. Man sues after schools fire him over MySpace page. (2007, March 24). Winston-Salem Journal, NC. Retrieved March 24, 2007.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Legal Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.