Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Student Rights
For the law and society project, my group looked at a search and seizure Supreme Court case relating to student rights (Safford Unified School District v. Redding). Aside from Tinker v. Des Moines, this was pretty much the only case that I've seen this year in which the Supreme Court sides with the student over the school. I've come to the conclusion that in most cases, the Supreme Court will side against the student. This is due to the fact that the school's primary job is to keep the students and the school safe, and it's difficult to prove that the measures taken to keep the school safe are too extreme. In Safford v. Redding, the court sided with Redding because it was such a blatant violation of her civil rights to strip-search a 13-year-old girl without any real reasonable suspicion that they would find anything additional in her clothes that they didn't already find in her backpack. In Tinker v. Des Moines, they sided with the students because the students were not doing anything except wearing armbands protesting the war, which was not posing a danger to the school. However, it's rare in cases with a student against the school that the courts will side with the student. This has led to students having very few rights on campus. While I do agree that it's important that a school's first priority is to keep the school safe, it's also disheartening to know that past cases have set a precedent that if anything were to happen, the chances that the courts would side with us are low.
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This was a great post, you very clearly summarized that it's difficult to get a court to side against the school if anything were to ever happen. I completely agree that it's somewhat disappointing, because these examples, in a way, demonstrate that schools can get away with nearly anything because chances are the courts will rule that the schools were only acting in the student body's best interest. This strips away many students rights, and proves that we need to be careful about our actions on campus, or even around it. Like Mr. Stewart said, schools have a lot of power when it comes to getting involved in altercations even off campus, since the courts can say that it still involved students that attended the school.
ReplyDeleteI think this is an important point that you brought up: as students a lot of our rights are stripped away. However, some of these are important for the school enviornment. This includes the school's rights to censor school newspapers and to ban references to drugs. This is important because otherwise, newspapers might be filled with vulgar language, and discussions of drugs may help make drugs more mainstream, convincing more students to use them. However, I don't agree will all the rights that have been taken from students, especial due process rights. Students should be treated the same by law enforcement and by school officials if there is any suspicion of illegal activities, such as being read their Miranda Rights.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/05/08/what-are-students-constitutional-rights.html?cmp=soc-edit-tw
I think that restricting students rights are alright, as long as they are for the benefit of the student population. What I fear happening though is that as more and more of these student rights are taken away, I wonder how this will affect that generation. A generation that grows up with less and less rights doesn't sound good for the future of the US. Students should know their own rights and reaches of the law as they group up. Instead, sometimes I feel like the school/school board will have the final decision on our choices and that it isn't up for negotiation.
ReplyDeleteThis post was perfect in describing the way that students' rights are not necessarily the court's biggest priority. While they want to preserve our rights, they want to keep us safe. I feel like this is a big part of the way that there is a lack of communication about what each side wants, because keeping us safe does not have to mean taking away our fundamental rights. There should be ways that we can express ourselves at school without having to worry about whether the school will punish us in an extreme way.
ReplyDeleteI think that this is a great post that relates to our current situation as students, where our rights cannot necessarily be protected in the court all because the school has the jurisdiction to take what actions they can in the name of protecting their student. However, I believe that student's rights should not be restricted to the degree they are now, because there are severe breaches of students rights that go against several precedents and are not restricted at all in the constitution and fit under the broad blanket of protection.
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