Privacy Rights of Students

Basic but Limited Rights

The right to privacy is neither explicitly guaranteed nor mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. In addition, students who are enrolled in public schools have even more limited privacy rights than does the average adult citizen. Insofar as school officials are responsible for students when serving in loco parentis, or in the place of the parent, any privacy rights that children might have in educational settings are considered in relation to the overall safety and well-being of others in school environments as a whole. In other words, the duty and ability of school officials to provide a safe and secure learning environment typically outweighs individual students' rights to privacy.

The Supreme Court enunciated perhaps the greatest impact on students' rights to privacy in schools in New Jersey v. T. L. O. in 1985. T. L. O. involved a high school student who had marijuana in her purse, which was discovered when an assistant principal was actually looking only for cigarettes. In T.L.O., the Court for the first time recognized that the rights of students are protected by the Fourth Amendment. Even so, the Court ruled that this protection is limited in scope by a school's need and the responsibility of educators to maintain safe and orderly learning environments.

In T. L. O, the Court exempted school officials from the requirements of probable cause and a warrant (which law enforcement officials must have) for conducting searches of students or their effects. Instead, the Court maintained that school employees are held to the standard of reasonable suspicion in order to justify a search. This means that school officials have to have reasonable cause, based on totality of the circumstances, to suspect that students have broken or are breaking school rules or the law at the inception of searches. In addition, the Court explained that searches must be reasonable in scope depending on the age and sex of students as well as the severity of the alleged offenses. The T. L. O. standard applies to all individualized searches of student effects, including their purses, backpacks, desks, pockets, and other such places.

Some Specific Instances

School lockers may also be subject to search without violating the rights of students. Most courts have agreed that school lockers are indeed school property and thus subject to search at any time. It is well settled that students are issued lockers for their own use, but that the lockers are owned by schools and jointly controlled by both schools and students. As such, students' expectations of privacy of items in their lockers is lower than average. Still, “ownership” of lockers should be mentioned explicitly in local board policies in order to avoid conflict.

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