Over and above hypotheticals about "they know each other from school" or "it affects the learning environment":

School administrations should have less power than they have now, rather than more. If you let them be responsible for kids' actions outside of school, nothing good will come of it. They're not competent to take on that job.

Let me provide a common hypothetical:

- A student is being bullied. This bullying is happening using social media and or text messages. These messages are being sent at various times pseudo-anonymously but there's strong reason to know who it is.

Who, exactly, is the authority who we expect to look into this? Is it the police? Using what law/powers? Are social workers empowered? We're clearly not ok with the school doing it.

So is bullying that happens outside of school hours just a free-for-all? I'm genuinely asking. It is fine if everyone agrees that schools shouldn't and that it is authoritarian to do so, but then who exactly is the authority? If police are, then when the police slap handcuffs on a K-12 kid, everyone loses their mind about that too and asks "why is this a police matter?!" "Why are we criminalizing young people?!"

I'm not saying I have all the answers: Because I absolutely do not. But I am saying people need to think about the bigger picture about how this works and who is responsible for what.

Send them back with a legal-looking note "I paid for this phone, legally it is mine and not the child's. As you are a government institution, any request to view it either comes with a warrant, or pre-reading payment of $1,000,000 for every character in the message which you intend to read. Your receipt and acknowledgement of this letter counts as a binding agreement to these terms."

If they want to play a foolish game, play it right back and watch them falter. My father had lots of fun doing this when I was in school, as most admin-level people don't know what truly is legal and what is not.

American schools are so authoritarian, it's no wonder we are having such a problem preserving faith in our system of democracy in the United States. In public schools, the word of unelected random adults is law, the rules are completely arbitrary, students have no right to privacy, no freedom of movement, sometimes not even control over how they dress or who they speak to. If an American public school was a country, it'd be Putin's Russia, and that only because of the pretense of meaningless "student government".

Maybe if we wanted people to believe that the political system of this country made sense and was worth protecting, we would structure our education system to reflect its alleged values.

I don't have a smart phone but surely there must be an app that creates a fake text messaging UI and locks the real messages behind a unique password?

If it could be done technically, setting a child's phone to receive only messages that include a valid ID would discourage abuse by making abuse traceable. The school would insist that all children's phones are set up this way so that there's no stigma attached to a particular child not receiving SMS or whatever.

But it's simpler to let the police handle the problem and determine whether it's harassment, or if it's a case of crybullying.

A school's not going to be able to stop bullying. But with message tracking devices in everyone's hand and cameras everywhere, the SCHOOL's problems are solvable without having to go into childrens' phones.