A second look at "coextensiveness"

As I was going through the Supreme Court rulings on student speech, and trying to map the various guidelines therein ("pedagogical concern"! "political viewpoint"!) onto the digital landscape, I thought back to my own classmates who, because of their online misdoings, ran afoul of the administrators. My sophomore year, a few of them were given detention after a conscientious monitor turned them in for impersonating our history teacher on MySpace. Far more serious was the scandal that hit the public high school in my district, involving pornographic photos of underage students who'd unwittingly seen to their circulation on cell phones.

With the assigned cases in mind, I started wondering about the ramifications of an intermediate scenario. In other words, what if a high schooler engaged in online speech that, while objectionable and lacking in substance, neither related to student life nor broke any laws? Is there a liminal zone between the jurisdictions of a school board and the state at large?

I worry that such a chute, of protected speech for minors, is narrowing down to nothingness, as territoriality becomes an increasingly outmoded concept.  It's worrisome to me that public schools might overreach by cracking down on off-campus speech, under the pretext that abusive commentary online could redound to the classroom. 

True, anything a student willfully records on the Internet--be it a harangue like Avery Doninger's, or harassment like the so-called "cyberbullies'"--has the potential to spill over into the schools themselves and disrupt their civic function. Just as there's a doctrine of administrators being able to curtail students' rights once they set foot inside a public school, as if they henceforth aren't accorded the same status and entitlements as adults, so should there be a legal distinction between schoolchildren and children.  Hence the titular potshot at coextensiveness.

Maybe it would be meaningless to instantiate such a secondary distinction, considering that most children (at least those capable of uploading slurs to the Internet) also go to school, if not a public school necessarily. But I got the idea, which I haven't entirely thought through from a reading I did yesterday for another class ("Democracy and the Politics of Opposition").  It dealt with an Indian court's ruling that no office-seeker may use religion to discredit an opponent or to promote himself. However, the office-seeker may speak to his religious convictions in isolation from the contest at hand, and an ordinary citizen may lambast that office-seeker's religion even as it pertains to the contest. 

I'm going off the deep end here, so my point is essentially this: in determining whether speech should be protected by the First Amendment, one relevant factor might be the target of that speech, namely whether it's a curricular matter or not. That's what my kooky distinction, between children and schoolchildren, would hinge on.

(PS - Was anyone terrified like I was by Justice Thomas's concurring opinion, hearkening back to the early 1800s? What's next--a cat-o'-ninetails in every classroom?!  Also, all this talk of online speech inspired me to post a shout-out to the Tinker case on Yale FML...)