> I would tend to agree, but sadly children don't seem to have such
>> privacy rights. How many times did you see kids passing notes in
>> class, who were required to give those notes up to the teacher? How
>> many times did teachers demand to look inside your notebook in school?
>> This is just an extension of the same thing.
> No, I see it as something very different. When a teacher takes a note
> being passed around the room, it is in response to active behavior...
> Reading a notebook while in class is to ensure the student is working
> on the assignment properly..
Agreed. Exactly. I'm a (college) teacher and that's how I always understood it when I was a student. Passing the note is a visible disturbance. The notebook is supposed to contain assigned work (or lecture notes -- and notetaking is a skill that we teach). Neither one is private. If a student had another notebook, or another section of the notebook, not containing assigned work, the teacher would have no reason to look at it.
As to the key issue here, my high school had pay phones which kids
> used. I never heard of any school listening in to pay phone calls,
> recording who made them and to what number. The school could care > less.
> They have no business doing likewise with cellphones except in
> extremely grave circumstances with a court order. I see no reason
> they should have access to a student's cell phone for its records. ...
> Except in very extreme rare cases, schools did not bother reading
> personal entries in notebooks, track a student's associations or
> telephone calls. My school would not check lockers except in extreme
> cases. Everybody doodles and some doodling can be pretty bizzare. It
> didn't call for confiscation.
Query: What are the schools looking for in/on students' cell phones?