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Originally Posted by Levin571
I find it quite odd that at schools here in America where students learn about the constitutional rights, like the right of free speech and the right to no unresonable search and seizure, that these rules are bent and broken by the administration to the point where they are essentially nul and void.
An example is that I rescently discovered that my boarding school uses a program called "AIM sniffer" to log the AIM messages of all the students on our intranet (both incoming and outgoing). This is a clear violation of both the first and fourth amendments, and even thought cases like this have been brought to court, it still persists.
Another one is the locker inspections that sometimes occur at high schools, where even if there is basis for the search. While this can catch potential crimes or other actions, what about those innocent students who are just bystanders?
I want to know what is the opinion of the CD community on this issue (yes i know it had nothing to do with robotics, but i feel it is a resonable question concidering how many of us are or were students at one time).
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Actually, in numerous instances the court has decided that schools have a compelling interest in the well being of the students, and that the school itself acts
in loco parentis.
Just as your parents can infringe upon certain constitutional rights, so can the school.
For instance, a few years back there was a case in which a girl had been seen smoking on school grounds. When the administrator went through her purse, they found, besides cigarettes, marijuanna and a list of people she'd been dealing to.
Now, had this happened off school grounds, and had the person doing the search been searching for cigarettes only, she could not have been prosecuted for the marijuanna because it wasn't the item that was being searched for.
The most famous phrase from
Tinker may be that "students rights do not stop at the schoolhouse door", but that doesn't mean that the rights cannot be modified.
It's not the school--it's the courts, who have, in decades of case law, given schools the privilege to infringe upon the Constitutional rights of students if "necessary".
--Petey