Teens in Framingham, Massachusetts have had their summer spoiled by the news that the local high school’s administration will begin conducting searches of their cell phones starting this fall…. Once again, a school’s administration is joining the federal government’s absurd war on drugs by tossing out the constitutional rights of teenagers. They claim they need to violate due process by seizing cell phones to search the call records and text messages.
No reasonable person would suggest that minor students have the same rights as adults. After all, when a school acts in loco parentis, this means taking steps to ensure safety and accountability that might not be considered appropriate when the same thing is done to an adult. Nonetheless, I don’t believe that a school has the right to simply conduct whatever type of search it deems appropriate whenever it’s deemed necessary. At what point do parents object to their child’s school being turned into a modern-day concentration camp, in which teachers and administrators have the right to do whatever they choose whenever the choose, and for any imaginable reason? And what are we teaching our children through these actions? That they have no rights at all? That they are the property of their parents and their school, to be harrassed, demeaned, and degraded in whatever manner a teacher or administrator deems fit at that particular moment?
“We reserve the right to look through the cell phone,” Principal Michael Welch said. “It would be no different than if a student were to have a notebook. We’ve had instances of graffiti. We’ve looked through a notebook and found identical instances of graffiti.”
At what point, though, do we expect schools to treat our children with at least a modicum of dignity and respect? If we allow teachers and administrators to do whatever they deem necessary whenever they deem it necessary, can we reasonably claim to be surprised when our children rebel and call us on our hypocrisy? Of course, if there are reasonable grounds to suspect some sort of aberrant, dangerous, or otherwise inappropriate behavior, then schools should and must be allowed to take all necessary and appropriate measures. However, when you insist that you have the right to inspect a child’s cell phone for any and all reasons, you are in fact sending the message that a child has no rights whatsoever.
This may seem a stretch, and indeed rather silly, but how long until we have schools performing strip searches or cavity searches? Yes, I understand that in todays’ post-Columbine era of fear and paranoia schools sometimes feel as if they must err on the side of caution. Even so, should schools have carte blanche to do anything and everything to students and then justify it in the name of “safety and security”?
Do we really want our public schools turned into the modern day equivalent of re-education camps, where the inmates (students) are subject to the fears and whims of teachers and administrators? And when we decide to teach our children about the value of freedom and democracy, will we recognize the transparent hypocrisy and double standard?
Indeed, just what ARE we teaching our children??
