Can schools take away a student's civil rights?

Under the law, children in the United States are fully formed human beings with the same basic rights that adults enjoy. However, it also recognizes that children aren't physically and emotionally mature enough to handle the responsibility attached to legal activities like driving a car, drinking, voting or running for office. To remedy that discrepancy, the law implements ages of majority to define the age at which a person can exercise that right responsibly. These usually vary by state, but they govern everything from the right to drive to the right to marry without parental intervention.

All that changes as soon as a child enters school property. The legal relationship between students and school officials is best described by the doctrines of in loco parentis ("school as parent") and parens patriae ("the state as parent"). The former, for example, gives school officials the right to stop any activity -- legal or otherwise -- that disrupts the learning process. The latter allows schools to act as agents of government on students' behalf. In tandem, the two concepts have allowed courts to regularly uphold violations of students' rights that wouldn't have flown otherwise. Although schools have made exceptions for certain forms of self-expression, they've also censored school newspapers and suspended students for infractions like using bad language on school grounds and wearing hair past certain lengths. Schools have even been allowed to search students' private property. The prevailing attitude was that a school's responsibility to educate and protect children trumps student privacy, and allows school authorities more leeway than the police would have outside school [source: Dorf].

One of the most famous student rights cases, however, involved the suppression of student speech outside school property. Juneau, Alaska, high school senior Joseph Frederick unfurled a sign promoting drug use as the Olympic Torch Relay passed by his high school before the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. He did so in full view of his principal, Deborah Morse. She had the sign taken down and Frederick suspended for violating the school's anti-drug policies. Frederick appealed his suspension all the way to the Supreme Court, but the court found that even though the incident took place outside of school and constituted an expression of free speech, signs like Frederick's "[pose] a particular challenge for school officials working to protect those entrusted to their care from the dangers of drug abuse." As Chief Justice John Roberts said in his opinion, "The First Amendment does not require schools to tolerate at school events student expression that contributes to those dangers" [source: Supreme Court of the United States].

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