So in the USA the moment students step onto school property their rights fully vanished. School administrators can have near complete control over what students are allowed to do and say. It covers what students are allowed to wear. The K12 school system is effectively a prison system where students can go home at the end of the day. Let’s start with dress codes and mandatory school uniforms. We should all have heard by now that the primary reason of school dress codes is not for the students benefit, but rather to protect rapey teachers from getting in trouble with the law. There is far more to it than just that though. Even wearing simple accessories on top of school uniforms or that lie outside of the dress code can get students in serious trouble. Tinker v. Des Moines was over students wearing armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The school responded by punishing students who participated, and saying that the armbands were “distracting”. This is one of the few cases where students rights actually have won out, so now students can have limited first amendment protections. What about students ability to speak freely however? That too is heavily limited. Swearing and verbally bullying other students is what comes to mind to most adults. But what about talking about a creepy teacher? Or spreading the word about a teacher or administrator who is actively raping kids. That is policed, and quite heavily. You can have as much evidence as you want, but school administration can just punish the students talking about it if they feel like it. Unless students force the issue to a criminal prosecution of the faculty involved then nothing will be done the vast majority of the time. There was a teacher in my high school who falls under this exact issue. It took years and years of students being hurt before they even considered looking into the issue. We wonder why rape culture is so ingrained in the US, but I hardly see anyone talking about how school systems can enable this rape culture to continue and fester. Schools do not have to care about how valid the evidence of wrongdoing is. Normally in the real court system the level of evidence matters. Hearsay won’t be tolerated in a courtroom, unless you can prove you were there then what you say does not really matter. However, in the classroom a particularly nasty rumor can be enough to be escalated to a severe punishment. Especially so if you have a history of breaking rules, no matter how minor. Let’s say someone one accused another student of having drugs on their person, or in their locker. If a passerby hears that, and reports that. Then it would be considered grounds to search through the student’s possessions and their body. That includes a cavity search if it is deemed necessary, or that the student is acting “suspicious”. To keep this from being any longer let’s leave it there. In short students have next to no rights on school property. School faculty can go pretty much as far as they want, so long as they can give a semi-plausible explanation. Then we wonder why so many people turn out the way they do. Why something like rape culture is so normalized. Our K12 education system needs to not just be reformed, but to be rebuilt from the ground up.