School officials should leave criminal investigations to the pros

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Randy Blaser

Updated: February 8, 2012 3:24PM

School officials aren’t police officers or special agents of the FBI.

They are not trained to investigate criminal activity.

They are not trained to gather evidence, to handle that evidence, or even how to evaluate evidence.

They apparently don’t know or don’t care that in our society, the sworn agents of the law who investigate crimes and make arrests are not the same people who prosecute individuals charged with those crimes. And the police and the prosecutors are not the same people who sit in judgment at a trial, or mete out punishment when someone is convicted.

Yet school officials, with no special police training, continue to act as if they know what they are doing. They are police, prosecutor and judge, and trampling over the rights most Americans take for granted, or at least heard about while watching the myriad of crime shows on TV.

Educators at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire are the latest group of teachers pretending to be police.

You remember Stevenson, don’t you?

It’s where a faculty adviser of the student newspaper resigned in 2009 over the administration’s efforts to censor the student newspaper. It’s where student editors also quit the award-winning school paper over censorship.

Officials at Stevenson have moved from censorship to investigating alleged drug use and drug dealing on campus.

Don’t get me wrong. Drug use and drug dealing by teenagers is a serious matter. It’s illegal. I think it is a serious problem.

That’s why I think suspected drug use and drug dealing needs to be investigated by trained police authorities, not by school administrators who use ham-handed tactics to get the information they want from kids.

School officials aren’t talking about how they are conducting their investigation.

But a student has come forward, telling a reporter he was pulled out of class because an alleged campus drug dealer’s cell phone contained texts from someone with his first name.

The texts, reports said, inquired about purchasing marijuana-laced cookies.

The student pleaded his innocence. According to reports, administrators looked through his things, then picked up his cell phone and demanded his pass code. The student wouldn’t give it.

So the deans suspended him and barred him from participating in extracurricular activities.

So there you have it, charged, tried and convicted all in one neat little meeting.

I have no idea how serious the drug problem is at Stevenson. It must be pretty bad if they are hunting down all the kids with the same name as the person who wanted to buy marijuana-laced cookies.

But I do know that when crimes occur in schools, police should handle the investigation. Police know what to do. Police are trained to question, to investigate, to evaluate and handle evidence.

They know how to solve crimes in a way that leads to arrests.

Besides, I have yet to see a drug case solved with the “Talk-kid-or-you’re-not-going-to-prom” tactic on any police show.