Seventeen high school students have launched a federal lawsuit against a number of persons and institutions in South Carolina. The legal ruckus arises from a fruitless, over-the-top police search of Stratford High School last month.

At 6:45 in the morning, when a number of students had already arrived, several heavily-armed squads of police stormed the school purportedly in search of drugs. Students huddled in corners as police dogs pulled bags off their backs, and policemen pointed guns at them demanding they be searched. No drugs were found.

One of the defendants, along with the police department, the city, the school district and others, is the school's principal George McCrackin. The lawsuit claims McCrackin "planned, ordered, orchestrated and executed the Nov. 5 raid on the Stratford campus [and] has made clear” that the raid “will be and is the standard policy for Stratford’s administration.”

This privacy violation arose despite, or perhaps because of, the already surveillance-obsessed administrative culture at the school. Principal McCrackin was shown on MSNBC (see above right) with a ridiculous amount of surveillance equipment in his office. He was apparently so sure that there was someone with marijuana evading these dozens of cameras that he called in the SWAT teams. And where did he get all these cameras? Some of them may have come from federal tax dollars. South Carolina has received millions of dollars for security systems and other administrative toys under a so-called 'Safe and Drug Free Schools' grant provision of the federal 'No Child Left Behind Act.'

The incident ultimately points to the importance of consumer choice in the field of education just as anywhere else. Parents are taxed into oblivion to pay for schools and other government-dominated institutions which are increasingly becoming part of a kind of Orwellian control-grid. Many schools look more like a prison and less like a place of learning every semester. With families facing a highly-monopolized market and squeezed by taxes to fund the dominant alternative, their ability to choose among competing curriculums, much less privacy regimes, is strictly limited. When there's no competition, school administrators don't think twice about bugging every nook and cranny, and for that matter sometimes don't even bother to change the default username password on the surveillance software!

Consumer choice vis-a-vis the maintenance of individual privacy ideals and tradeoffs is as important in the field of education as any other. Parents should be able to choose for their own children how and when they should be watched in the name of safety or anything else. It is too important an issue to be left in the hands of surveillance-obsessed principals and other Privacy Villains.

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