Five Brampton high school students have been suspended for tweets sent after school hours that the board has characterized as malicious, explicitly sexual and violent in nature.

But at least one of them — a 17-year-old girl — was sent home for two days for tweeting her teacher is a “f------ loser” who lives with his mother and eats fish sticks.

She considers the punishment “ridiculous.”

The board says it’s appropriate.

Khadijah Haghighi’s comments were made off school property and on private time, but the forum — Twitter — is public, and that’s enough to warrant a suspension, says the school board.

“It wasn’t that serious,” Haghighi said from her home about her Oct. 29 tweets. “It was so long ago, I don’t know why they’re bringing it up now.”

The tweets came to light over the weekend, Haghighi said, when a student told the administration that several students at Brampton’s St. Marguerite d’Youville Secondary School were tweeting about their teachers.

“We strongly believe that the consequences meted out were well in line with the inappropriateness of the commentary,” said Bruce Campbell, spokesman for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic School Board. He said it was Haghighi’s “loser” comment that “warranted consequences.”

Haghighi said she was told if she had made the same comments in the classroom, she would have been given an automatic four-day suspension.

But she wasn’t. And she knows she’s said worse online, including sexually explicit remarks about teachers that were meant to be jokes between friends.

The school’s principal, Kevin Greco, spoke to the school Thursday morning on the subject of “dignity and respect, regardless of the medium,” but did not tell students the content of tweets that landed their peers suspensions.

“Hopefully everybody learned a lesson from this,” said Campbell.

Haghighi’s 22-year-old sister, Aminah, thinks students would have learned more from the suspensions if they knew what got their classmates in hot water.

“The problem is you can’t punish students for not teaching them this lesson and using two- to seven-day suspensions as setting a precedent,” Aminah said. “They don’t want to tell (the students) or teach it.”

Campbell would only describe how the offending tweets were worded in general terms — “I’d like to do such and such, this is what I’d do to this teacher — that kind of thing.”

In total, nine Grade 12 students were sent home Wednesday. Five of them received suspensions, three for two days and two for seven days. The two students serving seven-day suspensions have been pulled from the classrooms of the targeted teachers — two female and one male — for what the board called “malicious” tweets.

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“We don’t monitor social media, but when information comes to the attention of teachers, administrators, people like me at the school board, then we consider what that messaging is and we look into it,” Campbell said.

“When we’re aware of it, we act on it.”

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