Any right to privacy in a public school?

This is pretty mind boggling:

A news station in Georgia reports that an 8th grade boy saw a camera hiding in the ceiling of a bathroom at school. He takes it down, takes it home, and tells his mother about it. This seems like a perfectly reasonable response for the boy. She contacts the school principal.

Then it starts to get weird. The school principal said he put it there to catch students vandalizing the bathroom. And then the 8th grade boy gets suspended for taking school property!

The news station talked with the county District Attorney who said that schools can legally put cameras in public schools. This is hard to believe. How do we really know that the school principal put the camera in the bathroom to catch vandals? For all we know, he might be a pedophile. Would he have been able to get away with this if he had put a camera in the girls' bathroom?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.


The recent 9th circuit court ruling said that parents of children in public students have no "fundamental right" to control what sexual information their children are exposed to. The county DA says public school students have no fundamental right to privacy. Do children have any rights in a public school? Public schools sound more and more like prisons every day.