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.