Constitutional Rights at school?

[Travis Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Levin571

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.

I'm going to sound like an old fart for posting this, but.....

Back in MY day (1995), when I was a young whippersnapper, we didn't even HAVE Internet access at my high school in my podunk farmer town of Kinsman, OH! I often wonder why schools permit the use of such chat tools during school hours. I think learning, listening to the teacher, taking notes in class, studying during downtime, and doing my homework are all activities that should supersede chatting with my friends, sending email, taking naps, or (gasp!) browsing ChiefDelphi during school hours. AIM access is not something school districts are obligated to provide their students. I'd feel fortunate that your school even allows you to use AIM in the first place and deal with whatever restrictions they place upon the use of the software.

And yes, the school owns the lockers, so I feel they have the right to search them if they have reasonable cause to do so. Random searches seem a bit pointless, and I do think making kids lie down on the ground at police gunpoint is extremely uncalled for, however.