VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. – With less than two weeks left until the first day of school, the Volusia County School Board has moved ahead with a controversial rule change intended as a safety and security measure.
Anyone present at a Volusia County school district site or event is now subject to “randomized screenings (that) may be conducted without cause by the site administrator” using “minimally intrusive electronic devices” such as metal detectors, according to the revised code of student conduct.
When the district’s Executive Director for Grad Assurance and Student Services Mike Micallef presented the policy before the board Tuesday, he referred to it as “the official search and screenings of random individuals.” The district has previously said that the random searches wouldn’t refer to individual students, rather that the schools and events would randomly be selected.
Tuesday’s lone dissenting vote on the measure came from school board member Anita Burnette, who took up issue with the policy’s wording.
“Not that I don’t want to support metal detectors, because I definitely want to. It’s, again, about the verbiage of the policy and so that’s why I will not be supporting it,” Burnette said.
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The policy cites the Florida School Search Reference Guide from the office of State Attorney Ashley Moody, which acknowledges that while “(the) Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures” — as well as how it applies to searches conducted by school officials — such measures as the one passed Tuesday are needed “given the unique nature of the public school environment, and the need to balance a student’s protected expectation of privacy against the school’s need to maintain a suitable environment for education.”
(...) courts have eased the restrictions to which searches by public authorities are ordinarily subject. For instance, school officials need not obtain a warrant before searching a student who is under their authority. Additionally, rather than requiring probable cause, the legality of a search of a student depends simply on the reasonableness, under all the circumstances, of the search. Florida courts have consistently held that a search of a student requires a school official to have reasonable grounds or reasonable suspicion to suspect that the search will result in evidence that the student has violated the law or school rules.
Florida School Search Reference Guide | STUDENT SEARCHES BY SCHOOL OFFICIALS (excerpt)
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