A10 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, May 20, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Charlotte Williams, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Judi Bishop, Staff Journalist Our Vision To be a valued member of the communities we serve and to be trusted as an honest, truthful and reliable source of news. w w w Our Mission To inform, entertain and provide a public forum for the discussion of events impacting the people of the Emery County area and to inform with news and features relevant to those who call the Castle Valley area home w w w Our Principles We will be ethical in all of our efforts to provide information to the public. We will be unbiased in our reporting and will report the facts as we see them and do our best to focus on the good news of the county, its people, history and way of life. We will be strong and active members of the community and assist in any way that we are able. We will strive to provide the best quality product possible to our readers and advertisers...always. We will verify the details of news we are reporting and if a mistake is made on our part we will correct it immediately. We will always listen to suggestions on how to do our job better. Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. WEB POLL A Soda Pop World This week in the online edition of The Emery County Review we pose the deep and meaningful question: Just how much soda pop are we drinking in Emery County? Log on to www.theemerycountyreview.com/contact/polls and log your vote. It won’t help answer the great questions of life, but the editorial staff of The Review just hopes to prove that we aren’t the largest consumers of soda in the county. Teachers’ Private Postings May Make Waves in School Gene Policinski First Amendment Center Free expression is an essential guarantee of the First Amendment — the freedom to speak and write as we will, without censorship by the government. But the freedom to express oneself doesn’t necessarily provide a buffer against the reaction to what is said or written. For public employees like schoolteachers, that’s increasingly an issue in the Internet Age, when off-campus postings easily reach the school community. Example: A recent Washington Post story that reported on area teachers who had placed personal material or photos on social-networking sites like Facebook. The article is headlined, “When Young Teachers Go Wild on the Web.” The story describes D.C.-area educators who are relatively young and who have posted crude and potentially offensive comments or photos. Several teachers quoted in the story said they expected the postings to remain essentially private, or at most the province of a small group of friends who would understand their sense of humor, satire or irony. And, as one teacher in the story put it, her employer may be anxious about the posted matter, but “my work and social lives are completely separate. I just feel they shouldn’t take it seriously. I am young. I just turned 22.” The Post’s report might just pass as noting a titillating curiosity — if not for the potential pitfalls it and other news reports highlight for public school educators who might assume speech away from the workplace is protected by the First Amendment from on-the-job consequences. Legal protections for our speech are strongest for public employees when they are speaking on matters of public concern — government policies or public safety or political issues, as examples. In a landmark 1968 case, Pickering v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a public high school teacher had a right to send to a newspaper a letter to the editor critical of school-district spending on athletics rather than academics. But the distinction and legal protection separating “citizen” from “employee” isn’t always going to tilt in favor of the teacher. Courts in various states have sided with administrators if the speech in question impairs discipline or causes disruption in classrooms, or with co-workers or routine administrative operations, or if it directly affects students. And in 2006, in Garcetti v. Ceballos, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public employees have little or no First Amendment protection for speech made as part of their official job duties — in other words, when they are speaking on behalf of their employer. In 2007, a Virginia teacher was fired after school officials learned of a video posted on YouTube in which the teacher — masked to hide his identity — demonstrated how to “paint” artwork with his backside. Administrators said a controversy over the video was disrupting teaching. The teacher later reached a financial settlement with the school district. Just over a month ago, in Washington state, a federal district court said that school officials did not violate the rights of a teacher whom they transferred from a specialist position to a classroom job after a dispute over her personal blog entries critical of a recent hiring by the school. The court’s opinion said the teacher-blogger’s “self proclaimed role as a personality reporter of school personnel” had no relation to a discussion of public issues and would interfere with her job. Potential speech limits on public employees are not limited to educators, or to online video or text postings. In 2000, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled a state investigator could be fired for telling a racist joke at a dinner honoring retiring public officials, because it could undermine his agency’s relationship with clients and the community. The Post story concludes with an anecdote about a teacher who said, after learning her Web site could be publicly viewed, “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before.” But it’s that Internet ease in which a once-momentary aside, or a personal letter, or even a privately viewed video, can instantly reach a wider audience that is posing new issues — and potential dangers — for those in public jobs who choose to display the nonpublic sides of themselves. Gene Policinski is vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center, 555 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001. A Fence Proves to be a Farce at the Border Lionel Van Deerlin Copley News Service Who’d have guessed it? Our government entrusted the Boeing Corp. with an $860 million contract to build a fence along our border with Mexico. Well, not a fence exactly, but something the masterminds of technology call a virtual fence. Virtual schmertual - like almost any fence, this one was intended to keep people out. Specifically, uninvited guests from our neighbor nation to the south. But last week an impressively named agency, the Government Accountability Office, called a halt. Work on the vaunted barrier - or boondoggle, if you prefer - has stopped. Except for Boeing stockholders, it would be comforting to suppose that they, rather than the oftabused U.S. taxpayer, will pick up the $20 million tab their company already has run up for a monumental blunder. But few gamblers I know would take that bet. To the experts at Boeing and at Michael Chertoff’s Department of Homeland Security, the virtual fence looked like a New Era project that couldn’t miss. This was to be no insulting Berlin-style wall, or the sort chosen by many of our well-to-do surrounding their “gated communities.” So what would this new “wall” be like? All we have to go on thus far is what we see along a 28-mile border stretch southwest of Tucson, Ariz. It’s in a sector traveled for so long and so easily by so many intruders, you’d have supposed they carried a parade permit. So what hath Boeing wrought? Nine electronic surveillance towers, spaced three to four miles apart. Sensitive new cameras were to detect sneaky border crossers by day or by night. Their trespass would be flashed via a new radar capability, quick as a wink, to patrol officers on the ground who’d swoop in to nab the surprised intruders before they could whistle “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” A state-of-the-art system, this, devised by experts whose seeming genius makes one proud to be an American. After their demonstrated success along Arizona’s porous border, Chertoff’s gifted hirelings - for additional millions - would install those surveillance towers all the way to Brownsville, Texas. Future thousands of frustrated aliens would be left to mull the magic of American know-how. Except for one little hitch. Their darned things don’t work not as everyone was led to believe they would. Yes, an Associated Press report says some 3,000 illegal immigrants have been apprehended in this sector since December - but that’s hardly more than the Border Patrol had already been catching without any of Boeing’s Flash Gordon gear. And several hundred a day continue to enter the United States as they had been doing long before Secretary Chertoff harnessed all that electronic talent against them. We cannot expect the Boeing Corp., a seasoned supplicant of governmental handouts, to give up easily. Failure on the Mexican border? We’d never guess it from a terse comment by Deborah Bosick, a Boeing spokeswoman. She told The Associated Press: “Boeing has delivered a system that the Border Patrol is currently operating 24 hours a day.” That, and no more. For Bosick’s sake, we must hope she’s not paid by the word. And no one should suppose that a multimillion-dollar snafu in Arizona will deter her company from trying to revive a failed system. Nor its friends in government. After the border with Mexico has been made secure, says the AP, the same high-tech detection capabilities are to be employed to secure the Canadian border, too - which, let’s admit, has been penetrated by a potential terrorist or two. A fine project for Homeland Security, this. Our border with Canada - possibly the world’s friendliest - would be lined with the same surveillance towers and radar rig that their designers seem pleased with in Arizona. But why rely on something so demonstrably undependable as cyberspace and those unsightly towers pointing to the heavens? Why not model our border defense on the Great Wall of China? With a little imagination, those jobs at Boeing could last forever, though of course neither the Great Wall, nor any of history’s other celebrated barriers - from ancient Troy to the fences running east of San Diego - has done the job intended. It’s been said many times - border security begins at the border. But nothing will discourage a relatively free flow of the undocumented until U.S. businesses no longer are permitted to hire them something a good many important people don’t wish to see enforced. And the multimillion-dollar trafficking in smuggled drugs? Ah there, dear Brutus, the fault lies not in our laws, but in our lives. We buy the stuff. Van Deerlin represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 18 years. Visit Copley News Service at www.copleynews.com.