Students Don't Shed Their Privacy Rights at the Schoolhouse Gates

Students have a right to be free from unreasonable searches, and a right to keep their personal information private. This means that school officials rarely, if ever, have a right to search the contents of a student's cell phone or other electronic device.

But that's just what happened at the Saint Lawrence Academy in Santa Clara. A student at the academy was recently suspended and placed on disciplinary probation after a teacher searched his personal emails and photographs from an iPod. Worse yet, the search had nothing to do with the student himself – the teacher accessed the student's email account on a confiscated iPod belonging to another student who had been suspected of violating a school rule.

Students' electronic devices, especially smart phones, contain a wealth of information that reveal private details of their lives: their personal relationships, health and religious concerns, and more. In fact, one student's device might even have access to another student's accounts or private information. It's hard to imagine a situation where a school official has any right to search through the contents of a device, and even harder to justify using one student's device to access another student's information, especially here where the second student was never suspected of any wrongdoing.

Fortunately, the Academy has recognized this. After being contacted by the ACLU-NC [pdf], the Academy agreed to clear the student's discipline file, give him credit for work he missed during his suspension, and to revisit its policy on cell phone searches. Hats off to the Academy for recognizing, albeit a bit late, that the privacy rights of their students don't end at the schoolhouse gates.

Noga Firstenberg is a Volunteer Attorney for Technology and Civil Liberties with the ACLU of Northern California.