Students' Rights

The general concept of students' rights is that every child has the right to receive a free and appropriate education, and through this educational process, students have rights in many areas, including expression, discipline, safety, privacy, treatment, and accommodations. Therefore, students' rights are an important topic in any discipline that deals with education.

The focal point of all educational activity is the students. Teachers, principals, school social workers, school psychologists, and other staff are all put in place to influence the process by which students receive their education. Regardless of age, disability, race, sexual orientation, and so on, every student has the right to be treated and encouraged with the idea that he or she has value and worth, and the education should be provided as a component of anticipated success for the student.

Many professionals feel that students have too many rights and that those rights hinder the educational process. Some teachers and schools fear lawsuits and other legal trouble. Schools can be sued over questionable discipline practices. This may result in limiting disciplinary procedures and giving a small number of disruptive students the potential to control the classroom environment. In some cases, students have been known to report teachers by making false accusations. Any accusations made, true or fabricated, have the possibility of ending up in a lengthy and expensive court process. On a positive note, these restrictions help protect students and also welcome more creative positive reinforcement techniques.

Along with the diversity of the student bodies across the country comes a broad spectrum of circumstances that put stipulations on how the basic right of a free and appropriate education is materialized. Certain factors such as a student's neighborhood, race or ethnicity, socioeconomic status, level of disability, and safety put limitations and restrictions on the way that students' education is provided and their rights ensured. Local funding causes the quality of education to vary according to the district in which the student lives. A student's educational experience in a wealthy suburb may look very different from a student's experience in a poor urban district. In addition, a student's race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status may lower the expectations a teacher of another background places on that child. Again, this jeopardizes a student's access to fair educational practices.

There are various areas of student rights, and they receive attention to different degrees. There is a common theme of balancing rights on one side with different rights on another side. If a student's individual [Page 950]rights are protected, will that interfere with other students' rights? Through the blurred boundaries emerge some general rights that students receive, such as those pertaining to expression, discipline, suspensions and expulsions, corporal punishment, searches and seizures, school violence and safety, confidentiality, discrimination, and special needs.