According to the Castle Doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Doctrine) here in the US, you have to wait for the burglar to enter your home. Once they're inside, they're fair game.

They usually have a retired FBI agent who is a specialist in explosives handle the big booms for them. I wonder if they had him along this time too?

I seem to remember that they set that one off in a quarry, a deep quarry and they were at least a mile away for safety. I want to say that the shockwave made the guys' clothes flutter.

The walls of the quarry shielded any nearby communities. Why they didn't use this same location for this explosion I find curious.

We've hit the point where we need to have a separate court for educational issues, just as we have courts to deal with family issues, etc.

Judges that are well versed in the education code would make it so that many of these lawsuits could just be thrown out as frivolous.

If you lie to a teacher about having contraband and create a disruption in the classroom, yes. But that search is requested by the principle, not the teacher. If you lie about what happened to your homework, no. Don't try to apply a policy too broadly, it makes you look like an idiot.

Actually, every school I ever worked at (K-12 that is) had a piece of paper that the parents and the kid (at least once they were in high school) sign stating that they understand and agree to abide my the rules and policies of the school as stated in the student handbook and as determined by district policy. As for the loco parentis, it's part of the education code for every state as far as I know, and I'm sure that there are many precedents for enforcing it through out the history of legal decisions. I'm not a lawyer so I can't point you to specific decisions.

You missed that I stated that the if the student had surrendered the phone to the CAMPUS OFFICER (not the teacher) it might have been just detention. If she had surrendered it to the teacher, she probably would have gotten it back at the end of class or the end of the day without further action.

As for is it routine for the police to come to campus ever time a student breaks a rule, no. But it is not quite usual for the vast majority of high schools in moderate to large cities to have a police officer on campus during school hours because parents will sue the school at the drop of a hat because their precious snowflake would never do anything wrong therefore the school/teacher/administrator is wrong. The school is protecting itself from most of the frivolous lawsuits by having the police handle anything outside of simple issues.

Yes, it's sad, but it's where we are in the US.

She had contraband (as defined by school policies, which she and her parents agreed to by enrolling her in this school) on her person and refused to surrender it. She further lied about having it. The police had three witnesses that she had a cell phone on her. A search was justified. If they had continued with the search after finding the cell phone then they would have violated her civil rights.

If you don't like what the school had defined as contraband, you have choices.
1) send you kid another school (public, private, or online in some metro areas)
2) home school
3) in CA there is a test call the CAHSPE (California High School Proficiency Exam), if you are 16 and have completed your sophomore year of high school (completed not necessarily passed) you can take this test. If you pass, you are done with high school. I'm sure that most states have a similar test.

What most people either do not know or don't understand is that during school hours the school administrators, faculty, and staff stand loco parentis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis) for the student. They are in effect the student's parent with all the rights and powers thereof. So a search by a police officer at the request of a school administrator is perfectly legal. It's annoying but it is legal, anything found is admissible in court.

Students (esp. minors) DO NOT have the same rights as an adult. Everyone seems to forget this whenever there is a news story of this type. In my experience (7 years teaching high school), the administrators err far to the side of caution when it comes to defiant students for fear of lawsuits. Since most school districts are strapped for cash in times of prosperity they do everything possible to avoid expensive lawsuits.

If she had surrendered the phone upon the 1st request by the campus officer then detention would be appropriate. Since she continued to claim that she did not have a phone and further concealed it. She escalated it beyond detention or in-school suspension. I think that a fine is correct in this case. If you read the transcript of the officer's report, this student is known to the administration as a "problem".