After last week’s infamous food fight and the social media explosion that went along with it, the halls are buzzing with talk of students being punished for what was written in their tweets.

Can you be punished for your tweets? Yes. Regardless of whether you are on school WIFI, a school computer or your own personal cell phone, you can be punished by the school if a disruption is caused.

According to the Student Handbook, “Students are prohibited from possessing, sending, forwarding, posting, accessing, or displaying electronic messages that are abusive, obscene, sexually oriented, threatening, harassing, damaging to another’s reputation, or illegal. This prohibition also applies to conduct off school property, whether the equipment used to send such messages is district-owned or personally owned, if it results in a substantial disruption to the educational environment.”

Disruptive is the exact word that describes Twitter in the aftermath of the food fight. Students were able to organize a “Free Jeremy” chant via Twitter. Jeremy Burno, a senior, was one of the students who received the most immediate punishment for the food fight.

“I think it’s stupid that they will send you home for something that is said on Twitter because honestly that just takes away more class time for you,” senior Jace Caton said. “I got sent home because of my tweets and tweeting like “Free Jeremy” and for ‘starting a riot that disrupted the school environment’. Students are on their phones in class anyways so I don’t think the fact that people were tweeting more than usual really mattered.”

The “riot” mentioned, was a gathering of students outside the principals offices during passing period where students began chanting “Free Jeremy” (watch the video above).

While students don’t believe that Twitter was a disruption, administrators do.

“We generally are not monitoring social media however if like in the instance of where we had the food fight and then people were talking back and forth about it and if it’s something that’s going to impact what’s going on in the classroom and disrupt the classroom and take kids minds off of what’s going on in class then we’ll evaluate that and make decisions based on that,” principal Gavan Goodrich said. “Our job is to maintain a good educational environment and when social media gets in the way of a quality educational environment then we have to evaluate whether we have to step in or not.”

While rumors are buzzing and the school does have the authority to press charges and turn the food fight/twitter drama into a legal matter, the school is not planning on taking any extreme actions.

“I don’t see any legal repercussions. There are going to be consequences for those involved but I don’t see it going beyond that. I think that it’s always part of the discussion whenever you have something that’s chaotic in a public place,” Goodrich said. “If somebody was hurt and there was danger involved and if you look at the video tape you see bottles of gatorade hitting kids in the head and if it were to have hit someone in the head and we had evidence of who did it then certainly that person would be held responsible.”

Students’ Twitters, Facebooks, Instagrams and any other social network accounts can be monitored by the school. If the school or administrators feel like a students actions on social networks are posing a threat or distraction to the learning environment, they have the authority to take action.

“There is always a possibility of legal action and we’re lucky that we didn’t have that but it’s always out there and always available, but in this case I don’t see any of that happening,” Goodrich said.