We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different.

Charlie Serpone had no idea why he was being called out of class. But when he got to the principal's office on October 2, it was clear that Pope John XXIII Regional High School principal Reverend Kieran McHugh hadn't called him in to praise his work on the football field.

Referring to a stack of printouts with Serpone's postings on his MySpace page, McHugh informed the 18-year-old senior that he was being expelled from the Sparta, New Jersey, school for something he had posted on his personal page. Now Serpone is considering legal action against his alma mater.

"They had not only traced what I had said, but they had printouts of things I said when I answered other people's questions on their pages," said Serpone, who recently took his GED exam in preparation for attending a local community college. The former defensive tackle for the school's football team was the first victim of a new rule at the school that forbids students from posting on sites like MySpace and Xanga and explicitly forbids them from writing anything about the school or its faculty online (see "Catholic School Principal To Students: Thou Shalt Not Blog").

The rule was enacted earlier this year at the private Catholic school after McHugh told an assembly that administrators were trying to protect students from online sexual predators by having them immediately dismantle their personal pages on the popular Web sites or else face suspension. The move reportedly came after the school learned that a friend one student had been chatting with online was actually an adult pretending to be a teen.

Serpone — who'd been expelled as a freshman after an altercation with another student but was asked back to play on the football team — says he was told his expulsion was tied to comments he made about his coach, Vic Paternostro. "I got injured and the coach treated me like an ass," Serpone said. "When I asked him why he showed me no respect, he called me a scumbag in front of everyone." When a friend asked Serpone in an online chat why he had quit the team, Serpone referred to Paternostro as a "co------er."

Up until then, Serpone had what he described as a very close relationship with Paternostro, whose house he visited on weekends to rake leaves and split wood and whose Christmas tree he'd helped take down.

But it was that expletive that was cited as the reason for kicking Serpone out of school, according to his father, Chuck Serpone. "I was not aware of the school's policy, and I found out about it when my son called to ask me to pick him up," he said. (Charlie says he missed the assembly at which the new policy was discussed because Coach Paternostro had sent him to his personal orthopedic surgeon on that day in order to treat Serpone's bum knee.)

"They showed me that he was online, which I knew, but I never had a problem with him using the Internet for school and communication with his friends," the elder Serpone said. "I never imagined this could happen. There's lots of reasons to kick kids out of school that are more substantial in this day and age than being online."

A spokesperson for the school could not be reached for comment at press time. According to a story in New Jersey's Daily Record newspaper, school officials deny that Serpone was expelled, saying that he was asked to leave and he agreed.

Chuck Serpone says his son has a right to privacy and to express himself in the Serpone home, and he believes the message the school is sending is the wrong one. "I sent my child to Catholic school to learn things," he said. "And they're teaching him that there's one way only. If an individual does something wrong, do you shut him out or try to teach him the right way?"

Because Pope John is a private school, the Serpones do not have a clear-cut free-speech case, especially since the school's policy does cite expulsion as a possible punishment for "impugning the character of another person."

Regardless, the family met with a lawyer this week and is considering legal action against the school. Attorney Erroll Haythorn says he is in the process of investigating the case. He plans to contact the American Civil Liberties Union to see if there are any First Amendment causes of action in the case, but his first question is what exactly are the school's guidelines meant to protect students from?

"The guidelines say students should not be on the Internet to protect them, and that's fine and good," said Haythorn. "But it's outrageous that a private institution can wave their proverbial hand into students' homes where they are being monitored by their parents. Private institutions can dictate if students wear uniforms and how they present themselves in school, but [can] they arbitrarily come up with rules about the rights to the Internet outside of school?"

For now, Charlie Serpone says his days at Pope John are over, but even his expulsion hasn't necessarily curbed students' appetites for chatting online. "Out of all my friends on my MySpace page, maybe five have taken down their sites," he said. "The rest are just not mentioning the school and are changing their names and the states they're from."

— Gil Kaufman