Unfortunately, we are missing critical details but lets assume that this is a publicly funded school and this occurred in a high school setting. A teacher must have knowledge or probable cause that the students are doing something illegal, such as a conspiracy, and that merits a search of a students personal property. The teacher can not assume that the mens reas of every student is to commit a crime, there must be evidence to support the conspiracy of the students attempt to cheat or as we would say, burden of proof.

The teacher would therefore be guilty of petit theft, performing an illegal search and in violation of the 1st & 4th Amendment rights.

One could argue that the authority of the state has precedent over the rights of the high schoolers, but this does not give the state blanket immunity. For example, the search of a locker, for instance in some states, a state is the owner of the lockers and therefore the expectation of privacy is limited. However, this does not involve a locker, it involves a personal belongings not in the possession or ownership of the state. Therefore the expectation of privacy is now different and in favor of the student in this instance since the state does not own each and every bag of the students.

The general rule is:

1. Is there sufficient probable cause that a crime or conspiracy is being committed?
2. Are the safety of the students and school in jeopardy?
3. Has been a crime committed? If so, what is the evidence that the student is involved?

Me, I would contact the local police, report a theft, sue the school for civil rights violations and contact the media.

In a heartbeat, I'll switch to FreeBSD.

This type of crap, Linux vendors making deals with the devil, Microsoft, goes against the whole core philosophy of the OSS movement. It is a shabby excuse for Novell, Xandros and Linspire to ink these type of deals knowing full well that the @$$h0le$ in Redmond, WA will spin saying, "You see, they're signing these deals because Linux does infringe on our patents! Now be prepared to be assimilated."

Red Hat, in its infinite wisdom, negotiated with the devil themselves but yet didn't sign any deals because frankly, it would have most likely required some kind of statement Red Hat to say, "hey, look what we did. . .we're respecting patents!" And than our Borg friends at Redmond would have spun it to say, "we are your friends, and we mean no harm, now give us your money."

These type of deals do no justice to any vendor and simply give legitimacy to the public relations garbage of that Borg alien race software vendor named Microsoft. Simply put, a new distribution ought to be created and with the understanding that no patents deals may be associated with it but hey, IANAL, so I'm not sure how enforceable that really is. . . .