Officials, parents respond
Last month, the Fairfax County School Board revamped discipline policies after more than four months of debate.
The Answer Sheet:
"As education administrators have increasingly introduced police officers into schools, the result has been a blurring of the lines of legal and moral questioning of students by police. Share your story about student rights and parental notification in schools."
The Post
One of the proposals that failed would have required that parents be notified in advance of questioning for serious offenses when no urgent safety issues exist. Another would have required Miranda-like warnings in certain circumstances.
In the wake of the court ruling, some board members want to revive the discussion. But member Stuart D. Gibson (Hunter Mill) predicted “very minimal effect.” School resource officers are focused on campus safety, not prosecution, he said.
Helen Russell, whose daughter, Hayley, then 13, was suspended from a Fairfax school last year for more than seven weeks for stowing prescription acne pills in her locker, said Miranda rights would have been helpful.
The teen was questioned by four adults, including a school resource officer, then taken to a room to write a statement, her family said. Her mother was called afterward.
“I think it would have made Hayley a little less terrified and in control knowing she had the right to remain silent and could have had an advocate with her through the process,” Russell said.
In Reston, Dawn Daugherty was so upset about the way her son had been questioned at Hughes Middle — and in her view, intimidated into a confession — that she wrote four members of the School Board.
Daugherty said her son recounted the events in detail: Being interviewed by an assistant principal and a school resource officer who carried a gun. Taken to another room to write a statement. Kept there an hour. Told his statement was too short.
She was called after her son wrote the statement.
“If he could have, I think he would have said he didn’t want to say anything without me there,” Daugherty said.
When asked about Daugherty’s account, Fairfax officials expressed concern and investigated her allegations. They provided The Washington Post with a detailed written response from Margaret Barnes, the assistant principal in the episode.
Fairfax police said they received no complaint in the case.
Barnes wrote that by the time she interviewed Daugherty’s son, two or three of the other boys accused had said he was part of the incident.
Daugherty’s son “was never ordered to admit anything,” Barnes wrote. “There were no lies, intimidations, or threats.” The school resource officer “never said anything about making things difficult” or “jail time,” she wrote.
Barnes wrote that she brought the officer into the room to have another adult present while she searched the boy. “We talked to [him] about how serious this was,” she wrote.
Fairfax officials said that Barnes was the primary interviewer and that she could not recall whether the school resource officer asked questions.
Barnes said she never told the boy that his written statement was too short: “I asked him if he was sure that was all he wanted to write.”
The off-campus incident was school-related, Barnes wrote, because six students had a conversation that “suggested they were going to be high or bring marijuana to school. It would be incredibly irresponsible of us as school officials not to respond to an incident of this nature.”
The day it happened, Daugherty said, her son was “terrified” and reminded of a class essay he wrote in April. His topic was the Fifth Amendment, which he argued was very important “because without it, people would be sending themselves to jail in cases for which they had not meant to do so.”
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