CrimeBeat Q&A: Can school staff search students’ phones?

When do school principals or school staff have the right to search students’ phones?

Amy Fields, Windsor

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1985 established a two-part test for a legitimate search of students and their belongings: A search must be justified from the outset, and limited in its scope related to conduct suspected to have violated the law or school rules.

In Santa Rosa, school staff must have a reasonable suspicion that a phone “was used in some kind of wrongdoing,” said Jason Lea, assistant superintendent of human services with Santa Rosa city schools.

School administrators have more leeway than law enforcement officers, who must have a higher level of suspicion - called probable cause - or a court-issued search warrant before searching a phone.

Victor Leung, a staff attorney specializing in student rights with the American Civil Liberties Union in Southern California, said school staff members aren’t always fully informed about students’ privacy rights.

Last year, an assistant principal with the Panama-Buena Vista Union School District in Bakersfield suspended a late student after finding a close-up photo of marijuana on the teen’s phone, taking the image as confirmation the teen had smoked pot that morning.

The district reversed the suspension after the ACLU sent officials a letter explaining that the staff member did not have reasonable suspicion to search the student’s cellphone and, in any event, that the photos on the cellphone did not indicate that the student smoked marijuana or otherwise violated a school rule.

“If you’re accusing the student of doing drugs, there’s no reason to search the cellphone because the data would have no evidence of drug use in it,” Leung said.

California school staff may face greater restrictions for when they can search phones in the future, depending on whether a 2014 state Supreme Court decision and the new California Electronic Communications Privacy Act - which both strengthen privacy rights when it comes to phones - are applied to students going forward.

“I think there is a strong argument to be had that those protections should extend to students,” Leung said. “For students, their whole lives are on their phones now, their information, their photos.”