the clampdown on teen rights.

THE COLUMBINE KILLINGS FUEL A NEW DEBATE ABOUT FREE SPEECH, PRIVACY--AND THE RIGHT TO BE SAFE IN SCHOOL. ARE SCHOOLS OVERREACTING?

Antonious Brown was looking forward to graduating from high school last spring, when some friends told school authorities about a story he had written in a private journal. The Atlanta 17-year-old, who has been writing fiction for pleasure since he learned his ABCs, was imitating his favorite author, Stephen King. In a scene inspired by the book Carrie, Antonious's story climaxes with a violent graduation episode.

The principal recommended counseling, and that was the end of that.

Until April 20, that is. That's when two Littleton, Colorado, high school students went on a gory rampage, killing 12 classmates, a teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School.

Arrested and Expelled

Days later, Atlanta police arrested Antonious and charged him with making "terrorist threats," based on the same journal school officials had already seen. He was expelled from school and not allowed to graduate, and while lawyers battled over whether he needed to see a hospital psychologist (ultimately, a judge decided he didn't), he spent two days in jail.

"I didn't harm anyone," he says. "It was just a hobby. I let a teacher read the story, and the teacher said it was good. I've been waiting all my life to get to 12th grade. Then this happened to set me back. It's not fair."

Widening the Scope

Antonious is not alone. In the months since Columbine, authorities' rules for what is, and is not, acceptable behavior for teenagers have been drastically rewritten. Hoping to prevent another tragedy, parents, teachers, police officers, and the courts are trying to attack violence at its roots. Instead of waiting for another disturbed student to gun down his or her classmates, they have widened the radar scope for acts that could be signs of potential trouble.

The result: Teenagers are being interrogated, suspended, reprimanded, and even arrested--not for committing actual crimes, but for what they say in class, write on tests, post on the Internet, or e-mail to a friend, as well as what they wear and even how they do their hair. Taken together, civil-liberties advocates say, these policies amount to the biggest crackdown on teen rights in recent history.

"It all seems driven by post-Columbine hysteria and misinformation about safety," says Ann Beeson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "Students have always been irreverent, but we shouldn't punish them for that behavior."

Beeson and others say the crackdown infringes on the rights of teenagers, dangerously eroding the freedoms guaranteed all citizens in the Constitution.

But concerned parents and school officials say the extra vigilance is justified if it saves children's lives. School officials, for instance, saw Antonious's writing as a possible threat. "In light of what has happened to other communities," says Atlanta schools spokeswoman Lisa T. Smith, "no one can afford to take such threats lightly."

And no one is: In Marble Hill, Missouri, a high school student was failed for an entire semester for posting a Web site on his home computer that was critical of his high school. In Cleveland, Ohio, 11 students were suspended for writing satirically about the Colorado gunmen on their personal Web site. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a student was suspended for wearing a T-shirt that said "vegan" (authorities thought this word for a strict vegetarian diet referred to an extremist group). A Pensacola, Florida, girl was suspended for carrying a nail clipper. A New Mexico 15-year-old was suspended for drawing a plan for a video game that used his school as a booby-trap-laden battlefield.

Democratic societies have always had to strike a balance between safety and liberty. Since the 1970s, the pendulum has swung gradually back toward safety. Columbine and other recent school shootings have simply accelerated the trend. But many teens and civil-liberties defenders say the current efforts to protect students come at the expense of their rights. Those rights include freedom of speech, as guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution; freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment; and the right to privacy, as defined by the Supreme Court. (See article, opposite page.)

Free Speech on the Net

The crackdown is happening at a time when a powerful new communications tool, the Internet, has complicated the issues of free speech and privacy and blurred the line between home and school. Take the case of Zacharia Paul. Last spring, the Murrysville, Pennsylvania, 17-year-old wrote a top-10 list of the reasons his track coach was always angry. The list included many profane references to the coach's anatomy, which Zac admits were in poor taste.

He e-mailed the list to friends, and when it found its way to Franklin Regional High School, Zac was suspended for 10 days, given weekend detention, and forced to miss a key state track meet that he says was important to his future college admission.

"They were punishing me for hurt feelings," Zac says. "What I wrote was a bit vulgar, but there was no threat involved. If I had done this at school, that would be different, but they have no right to follow me home. This is no different than my standing on a street corner and telling a friend I hate my principal."

Except that, thanks to the Internet, any kid now has the ability to write something in the privacy of his or her own bedroom and, with a click of a mouse, zap it into cyberspace for the world to see.

Lesson in Civility

The school was not amused. Franklin schools Superintendent Lee Rieck says this was the second time Zac had written insultingly of a school staff member--the previous time he had called the librarian a Nazi--and that it was vital for the school to be able to stop him.

"When we reach the point where public schools cannot take steps against such indecency, then we seriously undermine our ability to educate kids in the area of civility," Rieck says. "Like a parent, the school has responsibility for a child's actions outside the home."

The ACLU sees it differently. "It's what I call subzero tolerance," says Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia. "Subzero tolerance is where punishment is given for behavior that doesn't even violate any rules."

Different for Teens

The rules also seem to be different for teenagers than for adults. Graham Gardner, a northern Virginia 14-year-old, was given a class writing assignment just a few days after the killings in Colorado. The students in his eighth-grade English class had 10 minutes to finish the sentence, "If I could do anything to this school, I would ..."

Graham began his answer with: "blow it up." The essay went on to say that he wished only to build a better school. By his next period, he found himself in the principal's office, where a uniformed officer told him he had the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present.

"I said, `Why are you reading me my Miranda rights?'" Graham recalls. "She said, `Because of the paper you wrote.' And I said, `You're arresting me for that?' I was almost crying. They made me wait for the next two hours in the office until my mother came. They gave us a piece of paper saying I was suspended for 10 days."

Coincidentally, three days earlier, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the same thing about his city's schools. "The whole system should be blown up and a new one should be put in its place," he said. Giuliani, who is now a likely candidate for the U.S. Senate, was not arrested.

No one would confuse Giuliani's rhetoric for a serious threat. But even so, as an adult, Giuliani has more rights than a student.

Rights With Limits

The rights of students have always been defined differently from those of adults. In the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas wrote that students "do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door." Students are citizens, the Court said, and the Constitution does apply to them.

But in several key decisions since then, the Court has recognized limits on the rights of students in school. In the real world, for instance, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. At school, the Supreme Court has ruled, school officials, not student editors, have the last word on what goes into the school newspaper.

In society at large, the Fourth Amendment requires that police have a court-ordered search warrant, or "probable cause" to suspect someone has committed a crime, before they can search someone's property. School officials have to have a good reason to search a student's backpack, but they don't need a search warrant. The protection against search and seizure is weighed against the school's need to provide a safe learning environment.

That's where Graham got caught up in Virginia.

"We have 1,400 students in that school, and we had some 10 to 12 cases of threats or apparent threats at the time," says Superintendent James Upperman. "There were rumors, loose talk in the hallways. Officials couldn't just say those are cute comments any more than they could if they were responsible for an airport and someone mentioned the word bomb. We can't afford to ignore them anymore."

Reasonable Measures?

But will confiscating notebooks and arresting unruly students really make schools any safer? Authorities who say yes point to Littleton. The two students who shot their classmates and teacher had given what could have been interpreted as warning signs, including wearing German military insignia, voicing support for neo-Nazis, and posting death threats against a classmate on the Internet. If those warning signs had been taken seriously, they say, perhaps the massacre could have been averted.

"Principals across America are under tremendous pressure for school safety," says Gerald Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. "They have to make decisions on the spur of the moment, and sometimes they make mistakes. But I say, if you have to err, err on the side of safety."

Others, however, say a crackdown on students is a poor substitute for a crackdown on the availability of guns. Whatever you think of their attitudes, kids like Antonious, Zac, and Graham didn't actually do anything violent. You can't punish every kid who thinks a stray thought, say civil libertarians.

"We are teaching kids something very dangerous," says the ACLU's Beeson. "We're saying that the only way to be safe is to live in a police state. I think we need to start a national dialogue on this before it gets out of hand."

RELATED ARTICLE: DO YOU KNOW YOUR RIGHTS TO SPEECH AND PRIVACY?

As U.S. citizens, students are protected by the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. But over the years, the courts have tried to balance the rights of students against the responsibilities of school authorities. In some cases, the rights of young people have been limited.

Here's a brief guide to two key areas affecting students.

* Freedom of speech: The First Amendment guarantee of "freedom of speech" gives you the right to say and write what you like, listen to whatever music you choose, and express yourself freely. However, in school students may not express their opinions in a way that "materially and substantially" disrupts school activities, the Supreme Court says.

Officials can stop you, for example, from holding a protest on the school steps if you are blocking the entrance to the building. Authorities also can stop you from using language that they think is "vulgar or indecent."

* Search and seizure: The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from "unreasonable search and seizure" by the government. In most cases, a police officer must have a court-ordered search warrant, or "probable cause" to believe that a person committed a crime, before conducting a search.

School officials, however, don't need probable cause to search students--or their lockers, purses, or backpacks. A student's rights, the Court says, must be weighed against the school's need to provide a safe learning environment.

In most cases, school officials cannot search you without good reason to believe that you in particular--and not just a random group of students--broke a law or a school rule.

ETHAN BRONNER writes about education for The New York Times.