School Admins Demand Access to Students' Cellphones

[Adrian Laguna]

The adults in that building need to be in charge and they need everyone to know it, or you're going to have chaos in short order.

The adults mostly decided that it wasn't worth the hassle for such a minor thing. Another incident involved the wearing of open-toed and backless shoes (sandals, flip-flops, etc). There was a rule against it, they weakly tried to enforce it, then they just gave-up and changed the rules. It is basically a slight anarchy with small things. However, if its something serious Security will be on you like a ton of bricks, and it will fucking hurt.

[Adrian Laguna]

Shit, I forgot there was no edit button in this forum. Though I was in Off-Topic.

Every teenager who ever lived thinks he's a lawyer, and if you don't follow the letter of the law, you get an endless litany of whines and complaints about playing favorites and "that's not fair" and whatever.

Playing lawyer is fun, it fails more often than not, but its been years since I've complained about he consequences of breaking the rules. I did once manage to find and exploit a loop-hole. I was gonna get two days suspension for arriving late (it was the sixth offense IIRC). Instead I skipped class and only got one day because it was my first offense.[/quote]

[Zero]

I roll my eyes whenever I hear teenagers whining about their rights. Teenagers like that are maggoty little self-absorbed dipshits who haven't grown up yet and who think the world owes them something, rather than them owing the world something.

So what is your actual position? Do you not believe teenagers should have rights, or is this just a general vent about kids being self-absorbed?

[Darth Wong]

I roll my eyes whenever I hear teenagers whining about their rights. Teenagers like that are maggoty little self-absorbed dipshits who haven't grown up yet and who think the world owes them something, rather than them owing the world something.

So what is your actual position? Do you not believe teenagers should have rights, or is this just a general vent about kids being self-absorbed?

Of course I believe teenagers should have some rights, albeit fewer rights than adults. But I fucking hate teens who like to talk about their rights, because almost invariably, they're just selfish little shits who think they've found a great new vocabulary for justifying all of their wants.

[Zero]

I roll my eyes whenever I hear teenagers whining about their rights. Teenagers like that are maggoty little self-absorbed dipshits who haven't grown up yet and who think the world owes them something, rather than them owing the world something.

So what is your actual position? Do you not believe teenagers should have rights, or is this just a general vent about kids being self-absorbed?

Of course I believe teenagers should have some rights, albeit fewer rights than adults. But I fucking hate teens who talk about their rights, because almost invariably, they're just selfish little shits who think they've found a great new vocabulary for justifying all of their wants.

Agreed. In relation to cell phones, like this shit, it isn't an issue of rights. They're searching property that you bring to the school. It's like searching your backpack, car, locker, pockets, etc., for drugs. There is still an implied right to privacy that the courts have upheld, but they haven't upheld it in relation to searching your shit in school, because it is a different situation with minors.

[Darth Wong]

The expansion of rights is one of my pet peeves. I keep hearing about new rights all the time; smoking cigarettes becomes a "right", and getting a driver's license without too many hassles becomes a "right", and ignoring school dress codes becomes a "right", and every other damned thing you can think of.

[The Yosemite Bear]

The cell phone policy is not the only change at Framingham: Staff will be required to wear identification badges at school. That move is an attempt to keep track of people who should not be on school property.

This won't work if the student body does not co-operate. It requires the majority to comply at the same time, and if they don't, the whole thing falls through. Happened at my High School, students were supposed to wear IDs on a laniard around your neck. I didn't do it, neither did half the student body. It's impossible to enforce a rule when doing so would result in a large portion of the students being mass-suspended. The next year the rule changed to "have your ID on your person at all times".

you should have seen the science club and the video productions club's reactions to the "Weapon's Po;icy" that banned the dissection kits we needed in schience class as well as the leathermen multi-tools on the belt of Every AV tech in the highschool. Funny thing happened to the principal, and vice principal. The Free cable TV they had in their office, we don't know how, but the walls were opened, and someone cut the Co-axil . We told them we could fix it in a jiff, but you won't let us have utility knives or pliers, or flat head screwdrivers anymore. I believe the science club just sent the formaldahyde covered baby pigs and adult frogs that they couldn't dissect anymroe to the principal's office.

[RedImperator]

The adults in that building need to be in charge and they need everyone to know it, or you're going to have chaos in short order.

The adults mostly decided that it wasn't worth the hassle for such a minor thing. Another incident involved the wearing of open-toed and backless shoes (sandals, flip-flops, etc). There was a rule against it, they weakly tried to enforce it, then they just gave-up and changed the rules. It is basically a slight anarchy with small things. However, if its something serious Security will be on you like a ton of bricks, and it will fucking hurt.

Then they shouldn't have made it a rule to begin with. The other side of the "enforce everything" policy is "don't make stupid bullshit rules". If you can't be bothered to enforce it, then it's not important enough to be a rule. A lot of times you get rules like that because administrators get a case of the little tin Jesuses and think their edicts will be obeyed simply because they're administrators, and they don't stop to think about who and how it's going to be enforced. That's why I loved the dress code crackdown: the administrators made the rules, and then they actually gave us the tools to enforce them.

[Molyneux]

The expansion of rights is one of my pet peeves. I keep hearing about new rights all the time; smoking cigarettes becomes a "right", and getting a driver's license without too many hassles becomes a "right", and ignoring school dress codes becomes a "right", and every other damned thing you can think of.

Students don't have a right to ignore a dress code, or to ignore school policies.

However, they do possess the power to, especially if they have their parents' support. If, for example, a school mandates uniforms, and a large portion of the student body finds it objectionable enough to deliberately break the rule, and the school calls their bluff and suspends them...

If, as was said earlier, the parents get mad at the kids, then they can undermine the students' attempts. If the parents support the students, however, then this will end up reflecting very badly on the school, very quickly.


The kicker with that scenario, however, is that it only works with school policies that the parents, as well as the students, find objectionable enough to fight against; that would rather diminish the frivolous things that students don't like.



As an anecdote, though, on a much smaller scale - in my high school, there was a group of students that would hang out in the cafeteria after school, playing Magic: the Gathering. Students were not allowed to play the game during classes, but it was not banned from school premises or anything.

The administration decided to tell the students in question that they couldn't play the game in the lunchroom after hours without a faculty advisor (they considered it a club); the head of the impromptu club went to the vice principal, taught him to play the game, and convinced him to get the administrative heat off of the students 'backs.

[Ender]

While I'm normally on the "shut up and take it like a man kid" bandwagon, this time I'm not. There is no legitimate reason for this. At all. The kids aren't going to have "Crack Dealer" in their contacts list, they are going to have "Jerry" or whatever the little reprobates name is. I can't figure out what their angle is. And until its out in the open, there is no reason at all for the school to do this, so I see no reason why we should let them.

[The Yosemite Bear]

that is because the purpose of highschool is to oppresse you on a regular basis (think the portion of the wall where it was compared to a concentration camp.) the courts have ruled that school admins can get away with a lot. (I remember the time they nearly killed a diabetc student because he was "Acting & Smelling DRunk")

[Covenant]

I'm suprised they're allowed to have cellphones at all. But I don't see a cellphone being out of line for a search in the case that a search is indeed conducted.

I really don't understand what possible legal basis there is for saying you can't look at someone's cell numbers. If someone is, for example, suspecting of dealing drugs and you make a seizure of their crap, why not check their numbers and see who they've been calling? I don't believe that an answering machine or caller ID is protected privacy in the case of a search pursuant to investigating drug rings.

Really, kids need to understand that a school is not really public property as such. It's governmentally run, yes, but they forget that most of the rights they have against search and seizure and such have to do with public land and police officers. Part of what I did as a security job for a summer was search people's purses and backpacks when they wanted to go to sporting events and county faires and such. Cops were not always authorized to rifle through, but you had no such protections against me on someone's private property.

http://www.aclupa.org/education/student ... arches.htm

That's a good link from the ACLU. You have diminished privacy rights in a school since they need to balance their job to maintain order and offer a safe, secure, and proper atmosphere for learning with everyone else's rights. Cellphone numbers, like a purse or the contents of a notebook or a calculator, would most likely fall under the same umbrella of 'reasonable search' especially if it was done by school officals or privately contracted security agents. This seems pretty open and shut. Yeah, you're in school. You have diminished privacy rights. So? School is not a country club. Deal with it for a few years and maybe you'll get to go to college.

[Glocksman]

While I'm normally on the "shut up and take it like a man kid" bandwagon, this time I'm not. There is no legitimate reason for this. At all. The kids aren't going to have "Crack Dealer" in their contacts list, they are going to have "Jerry" or whatever the little reprobates name is. I can't figure out what their angle is. And until its out in the open, there is no reason at all for the school to do this, so I see no reason why we should let them.

What they *could* be doing is cupying the contacts lists, dialed numbers, etc., out of the phones of students they suspect of involvement with drugs and turning that info over to the police to pursue further.

[Flagg]

When the fuck did schools start letting kids have cell phones on school grounds anyway? Christ, I remember when all beepers, walkmen, videogames, and even calculators (outside of math classes) were confiscated. Why the hell does a kid need a cell phone during school hours anyway? I can possibly see keeping a phone in your backpack or locker turned off beling allowed, but are kids actually getting and making calls during and in between classes? What the fuck?

[Broomstick]

Alright, think about it. Would you want your work demanding access to your private email account to make sure you weren't selling company secrets?

US companies have the right to monitor all activities that occur on their company computers. If I don't want them prying into my private e-mail then I better not access it on their machinery. It wouldn't give them access to all of it, but they would have the right to look at whatever I use their computer to send or receive.

[Broomstick]

As for no cell phones in school at all... nah, that would actually fuck with people's scheduals significantly. I wouldn't be able to get home most nights.

You do realize there was a time before cellphones, and people still kept schedules and managed to get home at night....

[The Yosemite Bear]

you do realize being 18 my senior year in high school I was quite the nerdy james dean

[Aaron]

When the fuck did schools start letting kids have cell phones on school grounds anyway? Christ, I remember when all beepers, walkmen, videogames, and even calculators (outside of math classes) were confiscated. Why the hell does a kid need a cell phone during school hours anyway? I can possibly see keeping a phone in your backpack or locker turned off beling allowed, but are kids actually getting and making calls during and in between classes? What the fuck?

Someone posted an article a while back about a guy who had a 1000$+ cell bill because his teen was texting messages in class all day.

[Zero]

As for no cell phones in school at all... nah, that would actually fuck with people's scheduals significantly. I wouldn't be able to get home most nights.

You do realize there was a time before cellphones, and people still kept schedules and managed to get home at night....

But now days, most people keep schedules on their cellphones, as well as their list of contacts, since it's simply much, much more convenient. I also generally don't carry a watch, so the phone thingy kinda doubles for that, since it keeps time fairly well. I don't think I'd actually know how to get ahold of my mother at night if I didn't have my cell phone with me, and it's convenient enough that many people with cell phones are the same way.

It's beneficial to me, and there's no real in-class disturbance caused by having a cell phone turned off in your locker, so why shouldn't I be able to have it there?

[Graeme Dice]

I don't think I'd actually know how to get ahold of my mother at night if I didn't have my cell phone with me, and it's convenient enough that many people with cell phones are the same way.

You'd go use one of the hundreds of millions of landlines that already exist. Or you'd learn to plan your life more than an hour in advance.

[Zero]

I don't think I'd actually know how to get ahold of my mother at night if I didn't have my cell phone with me, and it's convenient enough that many people with cell phones are the same way.

You'd go use one of the hundreds of millions of landlines that already exist. Or you'd learn to plan your life more than an hour in advance.

I don't honestly know her office phone number, or her cell phone number. As for planning my life more than an hour in advance... why? If this method is more convenient, and doesn't fuck anything up, what's your objection to it?

[Graeme Dice]

I don't honestly know her office phone number, or her cell phone number.

Then learn it. Write it down if you can't remember phone numbers.

As for planning my life more than an hour in advance... why? If this method is more convenient, and doesn't fuck anything up, what's your objection to it?

Well, it's more convenient for you. But that's just because you've just shifted the burden of scheduling onto someone other than yourself.

[Aaron]

I don't honestly know her office phone number, or her cell phone number. As for planning my life more than an hour in advance... why? If this method is more convenient, and doesn't fuck anything up, what's your objection to it?

You could simply memorize the numbers or keep them on a piece of paper in your wallet like I used to do.

[Zero]

I know you can do these things, but I'm more likely to lose my wallet, since it's something I generally need to have with me, whereas my cell phone isn't with me when I'm walking through the classes and whatnot at school. I'm liable to lose things I take with me. If I kept a little booklet of phone numbers and whatnot, that wouldn't be so bad, because I wouldn't need that with me, but honestly, if the cell phone is more convenient, and there's no real reason for it not to be allowed even if it's not on my person, isn't turned on, and generally can't be any kind of disturbence, then why should I have to justify having it instead of others having to justify the act of disallowing it? It's a convenience, and it causes no problems, so long as I don't take it with me into class.

[Sharp-kun]

I'm all for banning phones at school unless the pupil has a valid reason for having one there. They are disruptive.

This does read more as a "if we have to we will" rule, which I'm not that bothered by. If I was a pupil however I would simply password the phone and refuse to give the code.