Skip to main content

Search and Seizure in the Schools

This evening I am working on legal briefs for my Legal Issues course.  My case for this week's assignment focuses on whether searching a student's private property on school campus violates the Fourth Amendment of unreasonable search and seizure.  The long and short of this case is that the Supreme Court of the U.S. has ruled that it is not a violation of the student's Fourth Amendment rights providing that the search is reasonable and not excessively intrusive. 

For those that do not have a legal mind, the biggest thought to an educator is what is deemed reasonable and what is deemed excessively intrusive.  Knowing what the courts deem reasonable will help facilitate best practice where searching student's property is concerned.  Recently one student went all the way to the Supreme Court to help define what was reasonable and excessive in nature.  The Supreme Court ruled that this student's constitutional rights were violated when she was strip searched by her school in Arizona.  The school officials in this case suspected the student of hiding an Ibuprofen tablet in her panties.

The case was clear cut to me from the beginning, but poses and interesting question to educators.  How far is too far?  Many districts have specific personnel that are trained to handle searches in the even that they need to occur so that a teacher need not get involved.

What is your take on the subject?  How far is too far?  What do you consider acceptable?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spiral Review In All Its Glory (Decimal of the Day)

   The school district I am in has cumulative tests covering everything taught each six weeks.  The twist is, these tests are made by administrators and not teachers.  This really isn't a problem to me.  It is a learning tool for me and a teachable moment for my students on the importance of all material covered in class.       We as teachers can really get bogged down in the variables of a test like this.  By that I mean, oh the test question was worded funny or well they were only given one chance to show mastery on this, my students are _______ fill in the blanks, thoughts, and reasoning.  The one thing my school district did was have us put our scores up standard by standard right next to every other teacher in the district who had to teach the same thing we did.  My oh my did I fall short!  I say I fell short even though I had great reasoning as to why my scores looked the way they did... but upon further reflection ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adobe Creative Cloud

Summer is in full gear and I am in slow motion here lately.  I had surgery earlier this month and am still doing recovery so I'm spending a lot of time in the house.  One of the things I wanted to do was make my lessons more discovery based this year, find creative uses for our technology, and get out of the textbook.  I've been scouring blogs, websites, twitter, and everywhere for inspiration and I've found some pretty cool things that I'm going to incorporate into class this year.  One thing I want to do is make my own pdf's that I can download into my Good Reader account for students to use in class so that they can email me work instead of the LOADS of paper I ended up with last year.  But they can't just be normal Word documents converted to pdf because that would be too easy, and I want something with a bit of pizazz.  So I started scouring more websites, viewing YouTube tutorials to create the elements of things I've seen that I like and during thi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Live Binders

After 1/2 a week in the classroom I have pretty good reviews to report about Live Binders .  For those that didn't read my last post about the conference I just attended, I'll give a brief synopsis.  I learned a lot of cool free and some not so free technology apps and programs to use in the classroom.  My goal was to integrate all of these different types of programs into my lesson plans here and there to spice up life a little bit.  One of the programs I introduced this week is Live Binders.  LB is essentially a virtual 3 ring binder that you can add notes, documents, and websites to.  I wanted to introduce this tool to my students to give them a way to organize their notes, and encourage them to discover new resources for class.    Even better; LB has a free app for the iPad.  Here is a little video from their site: Here is what I've learned so far: Some students took to this program like a duck to water.  They were ...
Post a Comment
Read more