San Francisco's top public school official says the district is ready to suspend or expel students who participate in a purported TikTok trend the platform has already deemed violates its community guidelines.
Dr. Vincent Matthews, San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent, e-mailed middle and high school parents on Tuesday warning their children could face "discipline, including but not limited to, suspension or expulsion" if they record themselves in an apparent October challenge to "smack a staff member."
"I do not enjoy giving stark warnings like this," Matthews wrote in the letter, which was shared with KCBS Radio. "I believe our students respect each other and school staff, and that they are above doing the kinds of things that would harm members of our school communities, undermine an individual's sense of physical safety, or impede staff’s ability to service our school communities."
Matthews, media reports and even the California Teachers Association have portrayed the trend as a follow-up to September's "devious licks" challenge, in which TikTok users filmed themselves stealing and, in some cases, vandalizing school property. TikTok then removed the hashtag from searches for violating community guidelines. Searches on Tuesday for "smack a staff member" and similar queries in the application prompted no results for similar reasons, as seen in the screenshots below.
A list of "Upcoming TikTok Challenges" has been shared online by educators and school districts since late September, but it's not clear where the list originated from. The purported list said September's "challenge" was to "(mess) up a toilet/vandalize a school," even though "devious licks" originated with a video of a user pulling a box of masks out of his backpack that he claimed to steal from his school.
Although a South Carolina school district said last Friday it had suspended a student for "striking a teacher in the back of the head," it's not yet clear how widespread the "challenge" has become. Only two TikTok videos were hashtagged with #smackastaffmemberoctober, which TikTok hadn’t hidden as of press time, with just shy of 96,000 views.
One of those had been viewed almost 94,000 times (Warning: NSFW language) since it was posted Monday. In it, the user claimed they weren’t aware the "challenge" was a TikTok trend until their teachers talked about it at school.
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