TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Principals Claim Right to Search Cell Phones

Re: Principals Claim Right to Search Cell Phones

mc (look@www.ai.uga.edu.for.address)
Thu, 20 Jul 2006 21:08:27 -0400

<hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote in message
news:telecom25.269.13@telecom-digest.org:

> Scott Dorsey wrote:

>> I would tend to agree, but sadly children don't seem to have such
>> privacy rights. How many times did you see kids passing notes in
>> class, who were required to give those notes up to the teacher? How
>> many times did teachers demand to look inside your notebook in school?
>> This is just an extension of the same thing.

> No, I see it as something very different. When a teacher takes a note
> being passed around the room, it is in response to active behavior...

> Reading a notebook while in class is to ensure the student is working
> on the assignment properly..

Agreed. Exactly. I'm a (college) teacher and that's how I always
understood it when I was a student. Passing the note is a visible
disturbance. The notebook is supposed to contain assigned work (or
lecture notes -- and notetaking is a skill that we teach). Neither
one is private. If a student had another notebook, or another section
of the notebook, not containing assigned work, the teacher would have
no reason to look at it.

> As to the key issue here, my high school had pay phones which kids
> used. I never heard of any school listening in to pay phone calls,
> recording who made them and to what number. The school could care
> less.

> They have no business doing likewise with cellphones except in
> extremely grave circumstances with a court order. I see no reason
> they should have access to a student's cell phone for its records.
...
> Except in very extreme rare cases, schools did not bother reading
> personal entries in notebooks, track a student's associations or
> telephone calls. My school would not check lockers except in extreme
> cases. Everybody doodles and some doodling can be pretty bizzare. It
> didn't call for confiscation.

Query: What are the schools looking for in/on students' cell phones?

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