Editorial

Student Searching: A Scholastic Issue

In schools students want to be able to keep their personal belongings to themselves, and not have to worry about them being publically presented to other individuals when searched for. In my opinion ones belongings are theirs, and no one has the right to search another person for something that is not theirs, unless the item should cause danger to other students. There are many ways to search students, and under reasonable circumstances, yes a student should be searched. I believe these circumstances are only present when the student is carrying something that could harm themselves, another person, or a group of people. Other than that, why should a teacher or official have any reason to search a student?

In school teachers have a lot of power over your personal being, in fact more so than a police officer. When a teacher thinks a student has something that belongs to another student, what do they do? All they need is a little bit of probable cause that you have it and they can perform bag searches, locker searches, and sometimes even personal searches. A police officer would need a warrant to do any of these things unless they knew that you were a possible threat to their personal being. While you are in school teachers are so called “in loco parientes”, meaning they, to an extent, replace the role of your parents. The thing is though, that even at home some parents don’t even go to the extremes some officials do. At home if your mom thought you had marijuana on you, I’d like to think that most parents would first question you, since you are in their home and they are responsible for you and what you bring into their home, then if they didn’t believe you for reasons such as the smell of it that came off of you, they would most like search you. But they wouldn’t go as far as a strip searching you or maybe wouldn’t even search your room. Even your parents respect your personal being and trust you, so why should teachers be able to conduct a search with just probable cause when they are just a temporary replacement of your parents for the short amount of time you attend school?

When officials go about a search, one of the most important things in my opinion for them to have is individualized suspicion. I think the worst invasions of privacy among a large group of students are sweep searches. These are usually conducted when officials really want to find something but do not have reasonable suspicion of one individual or a small group of kids. The way about conducting the search is simple, lining up student with their backpacks opened and pulling out the kid from the group when they find what they want. Most of the time these prove to be effective ways for narrowing down if the item is present in school or not, but in the process most students may expose personal items that they’d might want to keep private and not want anyone to know about. I think in the case of student searching, sweep searching is an effective way of searching but it is also wrong and a lazy way to go about an investigation. I believe that it imposes wrongdoing and punishment among all students, especially the ones that have nothing to do with the situation.

The other issue on hand is the widespread dog sniff searching technique used by officials when they only have reasonable suspicion. This is a huge invasion of privacy, and though it is illegal for a student to have drugs that may be found by the dog, I think that the school is out of place when they conduct these searches. This is an issue that should most likely be handled at home by a parent. This would only be appropriate to do if a school was heavily impacted by drugs or other paraphernalia, and they provided multiple cases of scenarios where they found the contraband on students by conducting reasonable searches. If the issues of the drugs do not seem to impact the school, why should they worry about it? I don’t think they should, and if they cared that much about the students why don’t they just contact most of the parents by phone or email and let them know of the issue instead? Why not save the students from getting in trouble when they could go about it another way?

In my opinion most schools, especially Vermont schools, go about issues like this appropriately. Just in some rare cases where maybe an official goes too far is when this controversial topic becomes an issue. I just believe that unless the circumstances are that the student could physically harm another student or students, a student search should be mainly conducted in most cases by a parent. I think it’s the safe way to go about the situation, and you don’t have to worry about anything coming back to get you if you’re an official or teacher that works at the school.

My Interview

Interviewing the person I did was very interesting, and proved to be quite helpful. I interviewed Justin Jiron. Justin prosecutes criminals in court for the state of Vermont, and he deals with cases about searching and the fourth amendment all the time. He knew a lot about the subject, which astonished me since its taken me forever to learn about my topic and in his career he has to know all of these things for so many other topics as well as the one I’m covering. Justin and I got to talking and he told me some things I did not come across in my previous research. One bit of what he talked about was that in the court of law, if an officer obtains evidence that violates the fourth amendment, the officer cannot hold the confiscated items against them in court. This is understandable because a person’s right to being protected from search and seizure, even if they have illegal material on them, is still their right, and officers should not be able to take that away from them unless they have reasonable suspicion. He also explained to me that a person who is unconstitutionally arrested does not have to but can consent to being searched of their person. This and the rest of the information Justin gave me will be very helpful and will most likely help me out a lot when writing my editorial later on.

I knew Justin worked in the court system somewhere, so I had to figure out what exactly he did. I found out that he prosecuted criminals for crimes such as search and seizure and I asked to set up an interview over the phone with him. He agreed and said he'd be more than happy to do so. So I called him up and we talked for a good bit of time. When interviewing Justin, he gave me well thought out answers and though it took me a second to write down the gist of it, my talk with him in my opinion went quite swell. He told me it sounded like I had done my research based on the questions I asked. I asked him a total of five questions, all of which took me a decent amount of time to think of, and he answered them with answers that sounded like they'd be pretty legitimate in the court of law. It was very interesting hearing the different scenarios he explained to me that related to my question. The hardest part I’d have to say for the whole interviewing experience was basically setting it up; from finding someone that would be a good source of information to even finding someone who also had the time. Overall I think it was quite enjoyable, basically I killed two birds with one stone in my interview because I got a lot of information on my topic and had a nice interesting conversation about subjects that relate to it.

Panel Day Reflection

(I did not attend panel day, so by request from my teachers I am going to do a reflection on my first, not my second interview, in place of reflecting on panel day)

Officer Brian Fox of Hinesburg community police department has dealt with many cases in his life as a law enforcer. He was very willing to answer all of my questions with very specific answers. I found out a lot of information from him. Most of his points that he made were about how he could enforce the law more on students, and how officials can only enforce it to an extent, but they can do it with less reason. He also spoke to me about how school officials could search you with little reason whenever, but a police officer can only do it if they have reasonable suspicion, and they can do as little as a pat down, no farther. Officer Fox couldn't just pull over a student or anyone driving a vehicle and say "you look like you have marijuana in your car, get out so I can search it just in case...” He has to get a warrant to search the person's car and belongings, without one this action is illegal, but in school it’s totally OK for an official to do something like this. So the main thing explained by officer fox was that for an officer to search you he'd need more evidence, but for a teacher, since they are "in loco parientes" they have more power and can edge around your rights to search and seizure to an extent if they have probable cause to you having any sort of contraband.

Stakeholders

The two opposing groups in student searches are in my opinion quite obvious. There’s the group that all the school officials are in, this contains the law officers, teachers, and school principles. In this group they all want to keep the students safe, because that’s their jobs, and they go by the implemented school rules and regulations. Sometimes the people of this group may get confused on how to go about searching a student or exposing their privacy to keep others safe. Therefore causing students to feel exposed, and feel that their rights are being taken from them.
In the other group; the students are the ones doing the suing and bringing these officials to court. They’re reasons for doing so are always on the lines that their rights have been violated or their privacy has been taken away from them. Though they feel this way sometimes, it may not agree with their standards of privacy, but they usually don't realize the teachers and officials probable cause and reason behind the searches, or they do have what the officials are searching for. In my opinion the topic of student searching and the official’s personal opinions of reasonable suspicion and individual suspicion are very widespread and unclear. There are no specific guidelines, therefore causing all of these misunderstandings and court cases between both groups.

Annotated bibliography

annotated bib. 1:

Linder, Doug. "Exploring Constitutional Law." UMKC School of Law. 2001-11. Web. 01 Apr. 2011. .

This website was full of useful information such as various court cases across many topics. it provided an abundant resource of information about a few court cases that dealt with issues such as my topic (student searches). it also specifically referenced the Sarah Redding case and Vernonia case. It showed which sides were which, the controversy as well as arguments behind them, the winner and then some. This information was specifically helpful when creating the court cases blog post we were assigned. The Redding case was highly controversial and explained how inappropriately far school officials went in searching her for ibuprofen. Their argument was just that they were only trying to protect the other students by obtaining the contraband. This website even provided questions that came up in this case and argued both sides.

annotated bib. 2:

Turner LLC, Duff. "Individualized Suspicion Required For Student Searches." Law Library | Legal Professional. Web. 03 Apr. 2011.

This article spoke of the DesRoches court case that occurred last fall, and how it was unlawful to search DesRoches for another student’s tennis shoes. In the case, DesRoches and 18 other students are being searched for the shoes; the other students consented to the search, DesRoches did not. He decided to take this to court. DesRoches sued the school for violation of the 4th amendment under the terms that it was unlawful to do so, and the officials of his school did not have "individualized suspicion" to search him. The article went into detail about individualized suspicion, what it was, why officials needed it to search students, ect. .

annotated bib. 3:

Fox, Brian. Personal Interview. 5 April 2011.

Officer Fox spoke answered a lot of my questions about individualized suspicion and different search types. He also answered a few questions roaming around in my head that have come up in my research a bit but I was kind of confused about. These things include who has more power when searching and who would search who in different scenarios. He is a police officer so he deals with things like this all the time and he had a lot of very well thought out answers for my questions.

annotated bib. 4:

Jiron, Justin. Telephone Interview. 7 April 2011.

Mr. Jiron works in the field in which he prosecutes criminals in the court of law. Mr. Jiron gave great answers to my last bit of confusing questions that may have required a little bit more experience in court to answer than my previous interviewee. He went into detail using his past experiences and provided me with an abundance of intelligent answers to all of them.