Blog 4: The impact of school-sanctioned privacy invasion on students’ academic success

As I heard Savannah from Arizona tell about how one day at school brought on stomach ulcers, her reluctance to return to school for months, and the loss of her friends because they were embarrassed of her, I couldn’t help but think of my own soft-spoken, sweet, honor-role female students. Imagining any one of these female students of mine getting strip-searched because of an administrator’s alleged probable cause darkens my view of schools as pro-social institutions. No matter how strong a school official’s belief that a student had drugs on her and posed a threat to the student body as a distributor, there is no situation in which dehumanization and “traumatization” should be seen as appropriate protocol.

Institutions are adulterated when bureaucratic terms like “from a policy stand-point” permit such practices. A drug-free environment should not come at the cost of dehumanization. The injustice done to Savannah is two-fold: the stigma that is attached to a student in an incident like this is penultimate to the violation of a young person’s body. What I mean by that is, schools should never be in the business of turning a good, decent youth into a delinquent based on mere suspicion. Whether the student really does behave like a delinquent, or merely her self-concept is turned upside-down by such an event, has a profound impact on her identity and immediate future.

The impacts of such physical invasion and humiliation on a teen would alter his or her trajectory with curriculum and instruction because, as Savannah did, they would be inclined to become a truant. After all, the school sees them as a criminal already; why go to a place where the adults do not approve of you, and your peers have turned from you? Indeed, this one strip-search, one gloomy morning or afternoon, had a life-altering effect on Savannah.

A better practice would be to hold the student in the office and require her to be sent home. I suppose the school would rather have the incriminating evidence to brandish over the parents, instead of vehement parents defending their children’s innocence. If school administrators aren’t trained in the dangers of pharmaceuticals, as the district spokesperson defended, then they shouldn’t get so over-involved. Let me reiterate myself: it is not the job of a school to turn a youth, who needs all the protective factors she can get against adolescent risks, into a delinquent. Schools ought to administer corrective punishments, rather than punishments that cripple youth. Of course, chronic suspension is an instance of this that gets iffy for a teacher who cannot teach anytime that unruly child is in the room. But in this instance, we are speaking of those wallflower students, who may indeed pose some threat to the student body by being involved with drugs, but who need an education as bad as – or worse than – their peers.

I actually can think of a student in a situation like Savannah’s. J.R. was actually once my student of the month. His classwork was oh-so-meticulous. He was respectful and calm-spirited. Last term, the administrators nailed him with a 9-day suspension for having found large sums of cash on his person. J.R. returned to school with the wind totally knocked out of him. He was depressed and I could literally see the ruin and approaching disaster in his face. “They think I’m so bad,” he said. He stopped coming to school for two months. Then he either withdrew or dropped out. I never saw the boy again. This is a instance in which his culpability and involvement in drugs is more blatant than Savannah’s ever was, and I still believe the school did him wrong. My heart breaks that the “system” – this institution intended to equip, enable, educate – removed his last chances, his few remaining protective factors. He’s been left to the hands of risk, when a good punishment ought to eliminate risks of an offender to re-offend. That would be true restorative justice.