Student Rights Essay, Research Paper

Student Rights!

School today has a tense atmosphere at this point in time due to student?s rights. I have read a lot on student rights; I feel that a lot of student are restricted on school policies. One of the big current issues is about searching personal items and searching school property. ?A search does not have to end because the school official found the item sought? (Search for Weapons and Drugs). I agree that the school administrator should be able to continue the search if he or she feels the need. If a student has been found with illegal items it is a very high probability that they will more than likely have more items of the very nature on them. Everyone understands there are a lot of suspicion and worries about school violence. This does not mean that any one can just kick you out of school for being different from any of the other students. Antonious Brown a seventeen-year-old student has an extra creative writing talent and gets jailed for it. Antonious wrote a fictional horror story in his own journal that eventually kept him from graduating, suspended from school, and put in jail for two days. Days earlier school principal recommended counseling but no consequence took place, ?Until April 20. That is. That?s when two Littleton, Colorado, high school students went on a gory rampage killing twelve classmates, a teacher and themselves at Columbine High School.? Antonious is not the only one who has been affected by these kinds of rules. Zac Paul was suspended from school when he sent e-mail to a friend. Granted this e-mail was a type of vulgarity about his track coach. Does going to school suspended our right to freedom of speech of our ability to think and write in a way to get our points across? This was not Zac?s first but second time he has said or written something about the staff he had previously called his librarian a Nazi. ?When we reach the point where public schools cannot take steps against such indecency, then we seriously undermine our ability to educate kids in the area of civility,? (Lee Rieck, school superintendent).

Journalism is another big issue in freedom of speech. Statements from a high school journalism class article about the impact of divorce, teen pregnancy, sexual activity and birth control were supposed to be printed in the school newspaper.

The principal was thinking that using the student?s name in the quoted section of the newspaper and withheld the stories from publication. A lawsuit was filed by the news paperstaff, saying there was a violation of their first amendment freedom of speech of expression. ?Students and teachers do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech of expression at the schoolhouse gate.? US supreme Court (1969), Tinker v. DesMoines Independent School District.

Highschool is when most of these controversies come to be common knowledge due to students becoming there own person, and trying to figure out who they are and internal conflicts. Teenagers are more apt to get upset when putting rules on what they can and can?t express. One of the most invading privacy factors is cameras in the school, are students in a jailed and watched environment? Students do not like the fact that everything they do is being monitored by some inside the School Corporation.

Open campus is another of the highly argued aspects of school rights, student?s feel they should have the choice of what they eat and where they eat it. Teachers are allowed to go and eat wherever they please to do so. I have talked to many of my classmates that say that sometimes they will have to go hungry because they do not want or like the food served in school. Sure the school brings in some out side food that is good, after eating that everyday gets old.

Bibliography

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