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Monday, December 02, 2002

By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

To the principal of Keystone Oaks High School, Jack Flaherty Jr. was a troublemaker who flouted campus rules on computer etiquette.

To the American Civil Liberties Union, Flaherty was a teenager punished unfairly by school administrators because they disliked what he wrote on an Internet message board.

Flaherty, 19, and ACLU lawyers last month collected a $60,000 settlement from Keystone Oaks School District to settle part of a free-speech lawsuit against it.

	Newsmaker Name: Jack Flaherty Jr. Date of birth: Jan. 23, 1983 Place of birth: Houston Grew up in: Dormont In the news: Flaherty and his lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union just collected a $60,000 settlement from the Keystone Oaks School District. He sued after being disciplined by the school district for his writings on the Internet. Quote: "I wasn't fighting this case to get money. I fought it because I knew kids were getting punished for reasons the school couldn't justify." Education: Flaherty graduated from Keystone Oaks High School in 2001. He attends Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Family: He is the son of Jack and Carol Flaherty of Dormont. He has two sisters and a brother, ranging from 6 to 17 years old.

Flaherty, of Dormont, sued when he was a senior during the 2000-01 school year after administrators kicked him off the volleyball team, prohibited him from using school computers and barred him from the campus after 3 p.m.

He had irked Keystone Oaks Principal Scott Hagy and Athletic Director Joe Perry by publishing four comments on a Web message board devoted to high school volleyball. In two of them, Flaherty made fun of a Baldwin player and his mother, an art teacher at Keystone Oaks.

Court records show that Flaherty published three of the messages from his home and the fourth from a school computer -- that one with the authorization of his classroom teacher.

Flaherty says none of his comments was threatening, but Hagy and Perry were determined to punish him anyway.

Hagy says the message board contained a vulgar screed that Flaherty "agreed with" because he participated in the postings. Hagy says that gave him the right to punish Flaherty for the comments, even though most were made from home and were not the most objectionable ones on the message board.

U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose decided otherwise. She ruled that Flaherty's writings were protected as free speech under the U.S. Constitution, and issued an injunction reinstating him to the volleyball team.

The coaches and a handful of players quit over Flaherty's return. Other students tried to join the team, but Perry said it was too problematic to restart the program, so Keystone Oaks scrapped its volleyball season. Meantime, Flaherty pursued his free speech lawsuit against the school district.

He contended that Keystone Oaks' rules on computer use were so broad that students could be muzzled or punished for expressing opinions. That part of the case still is being litigated.

"The school district was embarrassed or offended by what Jack wrote," said Vic Walczak, executive director of the ACLU's Pittsburgh branch. "The truth is that Jack's really a hero for standing up for an important issue -- the right of students to use the Internet from home."

Keystone Oaks staff members have called Flaherty many things, but heroic is not one of them.

In publicity handouts and interviews since the settlement was paid, administrators have characterized Flaherty as a royal pain who turned a reasonable school punishment into a federal case.

"He was involved in a pattern of behavior that was to be interpreted as disruptive," said Keystone Oaks Superintendent Carl DeJulio.

DeJulio said Flaherty hurled a curse word at an assistant coach while a member of the football team, participated in raunchy cheering at a basketball game and talked of organizing a student walkout at the high school.

Perry volunteered information that Flaherty was convicted of disorderly conduct for hassling a student who had been given Flaherty's old Keystone Oaks volleyball jersey after he was bounced off the team.

Flaherty said he accepted his punishment for all those transgressions, none of which had anything to do with his postings on the Internet.

But, Flaherty said, he fought back when Hagy and Perry disciplined him for Web-writing opinions similar to those made by thousands -- perhaps millions -- of students on their home computers.

Walczak said he considered it shameful that Keystone Oaks had launched smear attacks on Flaherty since losing the lawsuit.

"Jack is really a pretty good kid. But they're embarrassed about the settlement, so they're trying to make him out to be a scoundrel," Walczak said.

Perry admitted in an interview last week that the case against Flaherty may have been mishandled. He said he initially thought that all of Flaherty's postings were made from school computers when he was supposed to be doing class work.

Asked if he might have viewed the case differently had he realized that Flaherty's writings were done at home or with a teacher's approval, Perry said that was possible.

"I think it's a real complicated issue with the Internet. Part of what happened in this may be free speech," Perry said.

Flaherty maintains that he tried to explain the circumstances, but neither Perry nor Hagy gave him the chance. He said Perry screamed at him and Hagy had decided that the Web writings offended him, so everybody involved would be disciplined.

In addition to Flaherty, two other Keystone Oaks students who wrote on the message board were punished.

Perry believes other Keystone Oaks students also were involved in the Internet postings, but they were never identified because they used code names on the Web site.

Flaherty's father, Jack Flaherty Sr., said the school district has tried to cover up its inept handling of the case by assassinating his son's character.

"As recently as two months ago, they had private investigators in the neighborhood, looking for dirt on Jack," he said. "The $60,000 to settle this is only part of what they spent on this case."

Flaherty Jr., now a sophomore at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, said he sued because his rights were violated but never expected to receive any money.

The settlement is a sore spot for many in the district.

Keystone Oaks school board member David Rauth voted against paying Flaherty or the ACLU anything, saying the district did nothing wrong. He wanted to continue litigating the case but was outvoted.

Perry feels differently.

"He won. We lost. We need to move on and forget about Jack Flaherty," he said.