A couple of high school cheerleaders up in the Seattle area have decided to take school spirit to a whole new level. Pictures of the pair are circulating through the Bothell High School student body via cell phones, which doesn’t sound so bad.

Oh, did I mention the girls were naked in the pictures? Yeah, this kind of thing definitely didn’t happen when I was in high school. Now, there’s lawsuits flying around because the girls have been suspended from the team. The parents say the real punishment should go to those distributing the photos. This is all very sophisticated.

CBS NEWS says that the girls are admitting an error in judgment but that the school didn’t take any action to find out who was distributing the pics:

Matthew King, an attorney representing the two families, told co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez on The Early Show Tuesday the teens “admit that what they did was an incredible error in judgment. The issue is not whether or not the photos were improper. The issue is what happened after the administration learned of the photos.

“Initially, they (school officials) did not report these to the police until after one of my clients’ mothers discovered the photos were floating around and contacted the police herself. In addition, they have done absolutely no investigation into who transmitted these photos, where they came from, how many people had them, those kinds of things.”

The lawyer goes on to say that the photo of one girl was taken when she was only 13, but doesn’t indicate who took it, or if it was self-taken. There’s also no light shed on how other students acquired the photos, but with no fingers being pointed around one could take the reasonable stance that the girls themselves sent them around first.

One of the girl’s mothers says that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime:

One teen’s mother, whose name CBS News is withholding because her daughter is a minor, told us, “If she had been caught taking illegal drugs twice, she would not have been punished this severely. The school has arbitrarily taken away the one thing that my daughter loves most. She will never get that back again.” 

So, you can do heroin twice and not get kicked off the team? What’s up with this school district?