From the "Still Not Obvious Enough" Department

[jackofallgeeks]

What. The. Fuck.

A bill approved by the U.S. House yesterday would require school districts around the country to establish policies making it easier for teachers and school officials to conduct wide scale searches of students. These searches could take the form of pat-downs, bag searches, or strip searches depending on how administrators interpret the law.

The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006 (HR 5295) would require any school receiving federal funding--essentially every public school--to adopt policies allowing teachers and school officials to conduct random, warrantless searches of every student, at any time, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Saying they suspect that one student might have drugs could give officials the authority to search every student in the building.

I can not express how much this enrages me. And you know what's worse? They'd probably say some shit like "it's to protect the kids!" Protect the kids from what? Certainly not lecherous or bullying school staff. Certainly not from an invasion of privacy, or an attack on their human dignity. Certainly not from constant fear. "If you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear" is always a load of crap, and especially when you're talking about arbitrarily-enforced searches for arbitrary or non-existant reasons. There're a lot of articles out there that compare public schools to prison, and this is getting disturbingly close.

There are no words.

And you know? People wonder why I'm so against schooling.
(Vector: amereternal)

Comments

[tzohekiti.livejournal.com]

I can just smell the sexual harrasment law suites.

[nif.livejournal.com]

If you are interested, the precedent case for this is New Jersey v. TLO (1985) Supreme Court ruling. I think it's sick. I would never search a student in my classroom because even though they may be little shits, I still respect them as human beings with rights. Have you heard about schools randomly weighing kids? As if weight isn't already a major neurosis for high schoolers.. now their teachers and classmates are privy to the exact numbers on a scale. It made me furious. It's shit like this thats going to make me lose my job as a teacher because one day I'm going to tell the administration (in front of my kids and God and everybody) to go fuck themselves with a rusty, pointy object.