Balancing Student Rights and Safety

Balancing Student Rights and Safety Concerns

Respective Rights and Responsibilities of Teachers and Students:

Within the educational environment, students give up many rights that they enjoy outside of the educational environment. For just two common examples, students do not enjoy the same privacy rights such as those commonly associated with Fourth Amendment constitutional protections against search and seizure without a warrant. On school grounds, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy (REP) in connection with lockers and personal belongings, or even necessarily in vehicles parked on school grounds. That is particularly true in connection with safety concerns arising from the dangers associated with weapons in the educational environment as well as in connection with illicit drugs on school grounds.

Educators have an absolute obligation to protect the safety, health, and welfare of all students, even at the expense of certain rights and privacies ordinarily enjoyed outside of the school environment. Therefore, even school regulations prohibiting over-the-counter medications and kitchen silverware outweigh the objections by students who have a legitimate need for aspirin or to use silverware to eat their packed lunches.

Free speech is also subject to much stricter regulation in the school environment than in society in general because the general welfare of the entire school community requires that administrators monitor, edit, and restrict certain types of speech that are perfectly legal and protected by the First Amendment outside the educational environment. Similarly, educators also have the authority to impose other restrictions, such as (temporarily) confiscating cellular phones in connection with violations of institutional policies prohibiting their use or possession on school grounds.

Personal Experiences in Relation to the Issue:

As a junior in high school, I once participated in a school trip to see a play in town. After the production, we were required to return to the school grounds with our class groups under the supervision of our teachers. The bus stop where we waited for public transportation back to the campus was much closer to my home than the school and I asked for permission to take the bus that would get me home in approximately ten minutes instead of returning all the way back to school with my class on a different bus and then take the school bus home from school. That route represented an additional hour or more to my trip home, so I tried to explain to my teacher that I just wanted to take the same bus that I routinely used to get around town. My teacher refused to allow me to go home directly because he said that the school would be responsible if anything happened to me on the way home and I had to return all the way to the school before going home.

Exceptions to the Teacher's Authority Justified by Student Rights:

There are situations where students have a right to ignore teachers' instructions. In emergency situations, a student has the right to ignore bad decisions such as to remain inside a building if the student honestly believes that is less safe than leaving. The inadvisable instructions issued to workers in the second World Trade Center building after the first plane hit is a perfect example.