First, as many have noted, the law doesn’t require anyone to give up said password, basically because that would last two minutes in front of a judge. Second, a lot of kids already have dual accounts; one for their friends to see and one for their families to see. So yeah, giving up the password to the family-safe account won’t be a biggie. Third, this is all assuming a kid uses social media. What if they don’t? How can they prove to a school principal they don’t have an account?
If a school administrator has to go looking to social media to prove bullying, they need to get off their asses and walk around their schools more.
In my experience, nope. I was often expected as a student to prove a negative to support my innocence. The attitude of a lot of school administrators and teachers (especially in small towns) is they are right, all the time, even when proven wrong.
States have been asserting their right to conduct locker searches (including searching anything found within said locker such as a purse or backpack) for some time now. Probably because most kids have sucky legal representation.
While I’m not cool with it, it’s at least more arguable to say that the lockers belong to the school even if the contents don’t. Facebook isn’t hosted on a school campus. A school getting access to Facebook accounts is like the school bugging a student’s house or person.
Can we make it so that when officials lose a lawsuit that they’re obviously going to lose, the money comes out of their pockets and their pensions first, and they get fired for wasting the taxpayers’ money?
At my old high school they conduct visual searches of vehicles parked in the parking lot in addition to the locker searches (with dogs, of course). The theory is that as long as everyone’s rights are being violated, then it’s totally OK. Same theory is used as for the veneer of legality for roadside checkpoints.
Legally, it’s more complicated. Schools don’t act as an arm of the government, they are trustees, acting in loco parentis. In many states they are allowed to hit your child in the same manner and under the same circumstances you would be. If they can hit your child, they don’t have to Mirandize them. We’ve all been to school, and we’ve all been punished for something we didn’t do under an utter lack of due process.
Unfortunately, we’re in an interesting (read: kinda awful) period in history when schools are increasingly becoming a primary means of applying state power to minors, serving as a conduit for the three Ps: Police, Prosecutors, and Prisons.
It’s not a contractual thing, it’s resolved by action of law. Both statutes and judge-made law create this status for schools. It used to be a status that was granted to universities until people sued citing the fact that they were adults. But that’s the critical distinction. It’s not completely literal, of course. There are a lot things only parents can do that schools can’t, despite the phrasing of “in loco parentis.” People do sue schools when their children are harmed all the time, for example. However, by and large schools can get a lot of latitude that parents aren’t aware of, until its abused. Fortunately, people don’t typically go into education because they’re depraved malicious individuals.
This most definitely won’t be stopping the bullying. Actually, it’s making people root for the bullies that their rights don’t get trampled, which is most likely making the bullied feel even worse, and maybe even making the bullying worse. So good job, school.
If only they got people who’ve experienced bullying to think of ways (laws, policies, whatever) to lessen the amount of bullying. “Taking this bullying very seriously” can lead to so many outcomes, most of them worse than they were before
