Keyboard crime and punishment

Free speech in the skibidi toilet.

Last fall, a Marana High School student got a low grade on an assignment and asked his mom how he might convince his teacher to give him a chance to improve it.

His mom suggested writing an email to his teacher.

The high school sophomore wasn’t sure how to broach the subject in an email, so, as he sat with a blank screen before him, he tapped out, “Mister mister I want to date your sister” and read it aloud.

His mom chuckled.

He deleted the sentence and typed another: “Skibidi toilet my grade is in the toilet.”

Skibidi Toilet is an animated YouTube show featuring human-headed toilets that chant “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes” while at war with men with cameras for heads. It is popular among kids in elementary school through high school. The word skibidi has made its way into the language of the young and is used in many ways, from a form of exclamation to an insult.

Still struggling with how to start the email, the sophomore tapped out one more joke from his kitchen and read it aloud to his mom.

“GANG GANG GIMME A BETTER GRADE OR I SHOOT UP DA SKOOL HOMIE.”

His mom didn’t think it was funny and told him to delete it right away so he wouldn’t inadvertently send it in an email.

But it was too late.

An hour later, Marana High Principal Caitlyn Kauffman and the school resource officer called to ask about the student’s whereabouts and inform his mom about the email.

The kid, identified in court as N.M.,¹ served an 11-day suspension thanks to the school’s “overzealous regulation” of his speech and actions in the name of school safety, his attorney Aaron Baumann² said in a lawsuit filed July 16 in U.S. District Court in Tucson.

Baumann contends that the school had no reason to believe the unsent email represented any credible threat to the school, and that the district unconstitutionally policed N.M.’s speech and violated his First Amendment rights.

“School violence and school shootings are incredibly serious, but courts have repeatedly held … that schools have a responsibility to not just protect their students when they're in school, but also to protect students’ speech rights when they're at home, even when they're talking about serious school-affecting subject matter like school shootings, like school violence,” Baumann said.

The punishment for the joke is now like a big pus-filled pimple on the kid’s academic record and resume.

Getting suspended for “threatening and intimidating” could weigh heavily against his chances of getting accepted to college. Admissions officers might not care about his GPA (the highest in his freshman class at the end of that year), or his participation on the Academic Decathlon Team. They might not even get far enough down in his application to see that he refs soccer games and is a member of the Civil Air Patrol and takes flight lessons on weekends.

Besides the effects on his prospects, N.M.’s family is also fighting to clear his name, Baumann said.

“The student has really been shaken by this,” Baumann said.

The school district hasn’t responded in court yet and a spokesperson declined to comment because of the pending litigation.

But in the age of school shootings and shitposting, school-issued laptops and spyware, N.M.’s case has the potential to define the line between private and protected free speech.

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Drafts Don’t Stay Private

The Marana Unified School District provides every student with a Chromebook.

The district also contracts with Gaggle, a software designed for school safety that uses AI to monitor keystrokes on those Chromebooks. If Gaggle discovers an alarming message, then a human team looks it over and informs the school.

“Content in all student Google assigned email messages and information found in Google Drive is monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” the district website reads.

The AI-powered software flagged the shooting reference and sent a screenshot of the unsent email to Kauffman, the principal.

When the principal called, N.M.’s mom explained that she had been with N.M. when he typed the draft email, that it was a joke, and that N.M. did not intend to send it. She didn’t realize the district could see every single keystroke her son made, including the draft email.

Still, that day, Kauffman suspended N.M. for 10 days and pushed for a long-term suspension of 45 days.

Baumann — a lawyer from the ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law’s First Amendment Clinic who’s representing the family — said it’s obvious the school never saw the message as a true threat.

N.M. was allowed on campus to take his PSAT and he sat alone as he waited for his mom to pick him up. And no one questioned him when he returned “about his mental health, propensity for violence, access to guns, or desire to ‘shoot up’ the school,” the lawsuit states.

The school was not put on lockdown or evacuated and, other than the initial call with the school resource officer, the police weren’t involved.

But the joke came in the backdrop of another school shooting.

A month earlier, a 14-year-old shot and killed two teachers and two students and wounded eight students and a teacher at Apalachee High School in Georgia. A week later, a rash of hoax threats alarmed schools around the nation. Tucson police arrested an 11-year-old boy in connection with one of the threats.

The day after the Tucson arrest, Kauffman sent a message to the Marana High community, asking parents to educate their kids on the seriousness of making jokes about guns and school violence, warning everyone that the consequences for such jokes can be long-term suspension or expulsion.

“Students feeling comfortable making statements about hurting others will not be tolerated at Marana High School,” Kauffman wrote, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges Kauffman never spoke with the student before she suspended him.

A hearing officer, Robin Meece, questioned N.M. for less than a minute during a long-term suspension hearing in which district officials initially approved a 45-day suspension. The lawsuit also alleges the family did not get an opportunity to cross-examine Kauffman, who did not allege the joke presented “an identifiable and credible threat of school violence.”

After weeks of appeals, the student’s suspension was reduced to nine days, which Baumann said is significant because any suspension of less than 10 days cannot be appealed to the school board. The final nine-day disposition came after N.M. had already served 11 days and attended two of three required therapy sessions.

N.M. is asking the court to order all records pertaining to his discipline be scrubbed, an order to forbid the enforcement of the school’s discipline policy in violation of students’ rights and various monetary awards.

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Case Law for Class Clowns

The bedrock legal decision on student free speech is a 1969 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court said schools can regulate student speech that “materially disrupts class-work or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others,” and students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

That case involved four students who were suspended for wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. It seems so innocent compared to the world of 2025.

The Supreme Court didn’t take up a case of off-campus student speech until 2020. The case landed on the high court’s bench after Brandi Levy, a freshman at a Pennsylvania high school, stuck out her tongue and raised her middle finger for a selfie she posted on Snapchat.

“Fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything,” the caption read.

The post, made on a Saturday at a Cocoa Hut convenience store, related to her not making the varsity cheer team and not getting the position she wanted on her club softball team.

The school kicked her off the cheer squad for a year.

The court decided 8-1 in Levy’s favor, saying her off-campus middle-finger salute amounted to criticism of the school and cheer team, which is protected speech, and didn’t create “a substantial interference in, or disruption of, the school’s efforts to maintain cohesion on the school cheerleading squad.”

The court said a school’s interest in regulating off-campus speech “remain(s) significant” in some circumstances, but did not give a hard rule on when or how.

Baumann said the case most similar to N.M.'s involves a Louisiana student’s violent picture he drew at home. According to the court’s 2001 decision, 14-year-old Adam Porter’s picture depicted “the school under a state of siege by a gasoline tanker truck, missile launcher, helicopter, and various armed persons.” The picture included a disparaging remark about the principal and a brick flying towards him, obscenities and racial epithets.

The picture remained in a sketchbook in a closet for two years until Porter’s little brother took the book to school, and it fell into the hands of school administrators who expelled the older brother.

The court found the drawings to be protected speech.

“The Fifth Circuit in that case said exactly what we're asking the court to find here, that the drawings didn't have a connection to the school because they were unspecific,” Baumann said.

Baumann said N.M. was at home and it’s obvious he was joking. There was no indication that the student had actual violent intent or the capacity to carry out the actions. And it was unlikely that any reasonable administrator could believe that the school faced a credible safety threat.

“But yet the school reached into the student's home to try to control his speech,” Baumann said.

1. We know his real name, but he’s a minor, so we’re not using it.

2. If the name Aaron Baumann sounds familiar, it might be because he ran for the state Legislature as a Democrat from Tucson back in 2016.