Thursday, November 20, 2008
Quick Poll
How much do you plan to spend on Christmas presents this year compared to last?
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- More: 6
- Same: 31
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Published Saturday, September 06, 2008 in Education
Schools can search cell phones
The Times-Herald
Students will have another reason next week not to violate Coweta County School System's policy on cell phone usage: a principal's right to search the content of the cell phone, including the student's pictures, texting or other content -- but within limits.
When the Coweta County Board of Education meets Tuesday for its scheduled monthly meeting, expect the board to act on hundreds of policy revisions required by law that cover topics as mundane as what state auditors require for capital assets reporting to more controversial policies such as what's constitutionally legal under student interrogations and searches.
What school officials are authorized to search and seize nowadays extends beyond a student's locker or vehicle parked on campus. Under this revision, it now applies to what's on their cell phone.
The school board's policy committee met Thursday evening to review and update school policies and regulations. It's something the committee does every year to review any changes required by any new state laws before the school board formally adopts the changes.
More than 70 topics were covered by changes in state laws that became effective July 1. The annual policy review also gives the board a chance to clean up any policy sections and make minor revisions as needed.
Added to one of the policies this year is a principal's authority to scroll and search through a confiscated cell phone's contents -- including its pictures, video, voice and text messages, address books, incoming and outgoing calls, calendars, e-mail and instant messages -- if the principal has "reasonable suspicion" that there is student misconduct.
Coweta Schools Superintendent Blake Bass said the cell phone search policy was a topic of special interest earlier this year at the Georgia School Boards Association conference in Savannah last June. Winston Dowdell, Coweta school board policy committee chairman, also attended GSBA's summer conference.
While the Coweta school board voted to allow the cell phones in schools last year, the phones have to be turned off during the "instructional day," which includes the times when students are riding or waiting for the school bus at the end of the day. If a student violates the policy, the school has the right to confiscate the cell phone with the phone only being released to the student's parents. Subsequent violations of the cell phone policy carry additional penalties, including suspension.
This year the school board will consider adding policy language to allow for the search of the cell phone's contents, but within the "reasonable suspicion" limits.
Recent cell phone search policies implemented by school boards in other states -- including Colorado, Massachusetts and California -- have been challenged under the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure.
Most recently a school system in California revised its cell phone search policy after an incident involving the school reading a high school senior's private text messages after he was caught talking to his mother on his cell phone.
"Although the school official had no reason to believe that [the student] was violating any other school rule, they still accessed and read approximately three weeks worth of text messages, many of which contained personal communications with others, including to and from his mother," according to a recent American Civil Liberties Union case last year that addressed issues of scope within the school's cell phone search policy.
Both attorneys on the local school board, including its newest member, Graylin Ward, expressed concern about the language and suggested tweaking it a little more before the policies are adopted.