Student Rights

Student Rights

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Children possess all the natural rights we adults do. Due to their lack of maturity, parents have the natural right to exercise their children’s rights on their behalf, but that doesn’t make the rights of students any less extensive than our own. Sadly, our school system often treats individual students no better than the family pet and have no problem disregarding their inherent rights.

Here are some of the particular student rights issues that I will work on fixing once I am elected to the New Hanover County Board of Education:



Equal Neighborhood Schools

It is well documented that students do best when they go to schools in their neighborhood, with fellow students they know and have grown up with. Superintendent Foust cares more about the district’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) scorecard than he does about the success of individual students. That’s why he has implemented a “busing” system that ignores the well-being of individual students, and ships minority students from their neighborhoods to schools in more affluent areas of New Hanover County. Once I am elected to the school board I will push hard for an end to “busing” and a return to neighborhood schools.

That said, these neighborhood schools must be made equal. They must be made equal in facilities, learning materials, student-teacher ratio, and in the quality of instruction dispensed. It is intolerable that students who attend New Hanover High School must put up with aged and broken-down facilities while students who attend high schools in more affluent areas of New Hanover County (such as Ashley and Hoggard) get to enjoy modern facilities. As a member of the school board, I vow to you that I will make this right. In addition, I am even considering a plan for rotating teachers every few years to different schools in the district, so that quality of education is equal at all of our schools. Finally, I would implement a policy that would restrict most large dollar private donations to particular schools in the district. There is no reason one particular school should enjoy shiny new amenities while others don’t. If private individuals and organizations want to give generously then they should give to the entire school district.

Student Privacy & the 4th Amendment

We all have a natural right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by our government. The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees this right, and I believe that our students should also enjoy this liberty, subject to the guardian authority of their parents. Law enforcement is required to obtain a Court order, based on probable cause, before this type of intrusion of our liberty can occur. However, our school district (like many others) has decided to run roughshod over the 4th Amendment rights of our students and have become willing accomplices with law enforcement to skirt our constitutional rights. Board Policy 4342 allows school administrators to seize and conduct individualized searches on students without a court order and that are based solely on “reasonable suspicion” and not on the higher standard of “probable cause.” These searches are not limited to desks and lockers, but can also include bags, purses, personal mobile phones, motor vehicles, and the use of metal detectors and trained dogs. Even more alarming is the fact that school administrators are authorized to conduct these types of searches on the entire student population without any individualized reasonable suspicion whatsoever. Our school board’s policy is to authorize “fishing expeditions.”

To make matters worse, our school district now wants to monitor the online activities of every middle and high school student 24 hours a day, all year long, whether they are on school premises or not. Assistant Superintendent for Technology Dawn Brinson has been handing out school district laptops and other devices to economically disadvantaged students; devices that they can bring home to use. However, her goal is to make sure EVERY middle and high school student in the district is assigned one of these devices in the next couple of years. These devices already track EVERY activity the student performs on them. Earlier this year, the school district then installed Lighspeed AI software on its network, that forms a profile on each student based on the information already being tracked. It then monitors the student’s online activities and alerts its “experts” if there is a “safety threat.” The AI monitoring program is currently in a pilot phase that cost the district over $200K to implement. The pilot is set to run out at the end of the 2023-2024 school year, but Superintendent Foust remarked at a school board meeting this fall that his plan was to make this program permanent, and he is planning to spend another $2 million dollars of the taxpayers’ money to do so.

Some will argue that this intrusion into the privacy of our students is warranted by safety and security concerns. Some will say that the school has a right to do this because the school district owns their schools and equipment and can dictate what happens with and on their property. Like Benjamin Franklin, I say “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” I strongly believe that our children should not have to give up their constitutionally protected rights in order to receive the publicly funded education that they are entitled to under the North Carolina Constitution.

Appropriate School Discipline
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There are times when a student’s behavior warrants intervention by the school administration. Episodes of violence, intimidation, drug and alcohol use or distribution, are all examples of conduct that can be detrimental to the well-being of other students. Some school districts have implemented “zero-tolerance” policies that often overlook individualized circumstances and impose harsh and unjust disciplinary action against the student. Other school districts seem to “look the other way” when dangerous conduct occurs, especially if the discipline would reflect poorly on the district’s DEI scorecard. I believe in the “middle ground” and in commonsense and proportional student discipline.

In the last few years, we have heard from many citizens at school board meetings who have been advocating for an end to the use of seclusion rooms. I agree with them! Our schools are not prisons or psychiatric wards. If a student is that much of a danger to themselves or others, then civil authorities should be called in to handle the situation.

I am also in agreement with those New Hanover County citizens who have been calling for an end to out-of-school suspensions. I don’t believe the policy which allows them has been discriminatory, but I do believe it’s not the best course of action. Out-of-school suspensions are a burden on working families, who simply don’t have the means to provide the supervision of their child that is necessary during school hours. Leaving these students with no supervision will only facilitate them getting into more trouble and falling far behind in their studies. Circumstances may dictate that the student may need to leave their ordinary learning environment, but we should provide an in-school-suspension environment that provides supervision and continued education.

Freedom from the Transgender Agenda

Whatever happened to just letting kids be “kids?” In my opinion, there is no such thing as a “Trans Kid.” There are an extremely small number of kids who suffer from a psychological condition called gender dysphoria. Boys who think they are girls and vice versa. These children should be treated with compassion and proper psychological care. However, any attempt to affirm the child’s false perception, by parents or by any other adult, is a form of physical and/or emotional abuse. Studies by Steensma and others have demonstrated that a large percentage of kids with childhood gender dysphoria will revert to identifying with their biological gender once they are through puberty. Thankfully our NC General Assembly recently outlawed the medical transitioning of minors. However, the whole process of renaming your child, referring to them by their identified gender identity, and dressing them up to appear as the opposite gender, can cause real psychological harm.

At this point, parents are still free under North Carolina law to wreak this type of psychological damage on their children. I encourage the NC General Assembly to take further steps to stop this form of child abuse. However, and in the meantime, our school district need not be willing participants in this abuse. Once elected, I will encourage our school board to adopt a policy that treats our kids as kids.

Finally, while there are some school sports activities that can safely be co-ed, I support athletic teams composed of biological girls only. Not only would allowing biological males on these teams be unfair to the biological females who are participating, it would also be dangerous. There are many examples of female high school athletes who have been severely injured when they are forced to participate in sports with biologically male students. I support the board’s current restrictions against transgender participation in middle school athletics and would extend those restrictions to our high school athletic programs.

My Rationale

In the purest ideological sense, our children do not have a natural right to a publicly funded education. While we all have a right to learn, natural rights are liberties that are granted to us by God. We are born with them. Even if tyrannical governments do not recognize those rights, we possess them nonetheless. They do not consist of entitlements that our government grants us.

Education is empowering and is the great social equalizer. Through education, any child, even those born in utter poverty and in deplorable conditions, has the opportunity to learn the skills necessary for a successful career, to avoid generational poverty, and to become the critical thinkers and the men and women that God wishes them to be. That’s why the drafters of our North Carolina state constitution decided to guarantee every North Carolina child an individual right to a publicly funded education.

Our state constitution has delegated most of the authority to administer that public education to local school boards like our own. It is therefore our responsibility to make sure that the taxpayers of this state get the “most bang for their buck” by ensuring that every child receives the highest quality education possible; an education that empowers individual students for success. We cannot accomplish this goal by trampling on the rights of the students we are supposed to be educating.

Got Questions?

If you have a question about a student rights topic that I did not cover, or if you just want to discuss a topic I did cover in more detail, then please feel free to Contact Us. I will always make time to listen to voters!