[citation][nom]awood28211[/nom]Schools have become jails for children. As a father I've noticed the school is more worried about discipline that about education. It's all about control. Blanket policies are not effective. They do not allow children to be children and children will make mistakes. If the known bully gets in a fight he should be more severely punished that the quiet kid who was the victim of the bully's taunting. Schools are horrible institutions.[/citation]
I agree with most of what you said, but the "let children be children" concept is often carried too far these days.
It is appropriate to make allowances for a person's age; a judge is unlikely to penalize a person convicted of a crime if he is a minor as much as he might an adult, and I think that's good policy. I also think expunging records of minors can be a good thing. However, letting kids off without any disciple at all when they do something wrong is sending the wrong message.
I'm not applying the above to this case though. A tweet is essentially a private communication, though it may be, and often is, published by the receiver. A school has no business policing tweets. (I would say there could be an exception in that if the tweet was sent to a school official, they might have a right to discipline the child.)
No one would allow a school to monitor personal phone calls, no matter how many people were added into the conversation. We all know that's wrong. The same principle applies here. We have the additional reason that a school has no business monitoring anyone's activity outside of their school (unless, of course, it is a private school and the parent has agreed to it).
On top of all that, this "4-letter" word has no meaning related to racism or other forms of prejudice; it's just a word used to express strong emotion (if not just used as slang in place of feces, or a more common word used for the like). Getting all upset over this word is wrong, itself. In fact, if you want it to lose it's power, then the best thing you can do is choose to not be offended by it.