14 DAY TRIAL // Principals in at least three suburban Denver schools have searched through text messages on the mobile phones of their students when they suspected them of cheating, drug abuse or other such violations.
Officials from the schools claim that the policies that allow them to search lockers, backpacks and cars also authorize the checking of cell phones when there's a 'reasonable suspicion' that the student has done something wrong.
"We have found instances of texts that revealed both drug transactions ? as well as pornographic material stored in pictures," said John Stanek, an attorney for Douglas County schools. That includes phones with "downloaded material as well as pictures of other unsuspecting students," he said.
While there has to be some security, snooping through the private content that someone has stored on a mobile phone seems completely unfair and most of all, useless. It is useless because it really isn't hard to erase a text message from a mobile phone and it shouldn't take students long to start erasing all their text messages regularly.
Also, teenagers were always known for their ability to code something in such a way that few people could understand what they were saying. In the end, this can be considered an invasion of students' privacy and schools should really learn where to draw the line when it comes to security.
"It goes far beyond anything the (U.S.) Supreme Court has authorized," said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado. A policy of searching students' text messages was proposed before at a high school in Massachusetts, but after receiving several complaints, the district ditched the plan deciding that the information they could gain from cell phones was not worth the loss of students' privacy.