Ashley Miles is like most teenagers – she can’t live without her cell phone.

The Perry-Lecompton High School freshman has had a cell phone since seventh grade and mostly uses it to text message her friends. Recently, such a message during school hours landed her in the principal’s office, where her phone was taken away until she served 30 minutes of detention.

Ashley admits that she disobeyed the school’s policy of not using cell phones during school hours and thought the punishment fit the crime. But she questions the means in which she was caught.

Ashley believes Principal J.B. Elliott looked through her friend’s cell phone – which had been confiscated – and located a message that she had sent earlier that day.

“I think it’s an invasion of privacy,” Ashley said. “I personally don’t even like my parents looking through my phone and so I wouldn’t want a principal to do it.”

Ashley said five other students were punished, and she believes it was because the principal looked at previous text messages on the confiscated phone.

“Everyone was pretty mad about it,” she said.

Elliott said he didn’t look through the cell phone. He said he caught Ashley and the others because they sent text messages while their friend’s confiscated phone was sitting on his desk. He said the names just popped up on the screen.

“That was kind of an easy one to get,” he said.

After learning about the student’s allegations, Elliott said he likely would implement a new policy of having the students take the batteries out of the cell phones once they are confiscated.

Other schools might want to look at their policies as text messaging becomes more popular as a mode of communication.

According to CellSigns Inc., more than 18.6 billion text messages were sent per month in 2006. That number has grown by 250 percent each year for the past two years.

Sprint spokeswoman Emmy Anderson said text messaging usage is growing fastest among teens and the 40- to 50-year-old age group. The number of Sprint customers who use text messaging has increased 23 percent during the past year.

Gray area

Kevin Ireland, staff attorney with the Kansas State Department of Education, said the problem is that technology is moving faster than school policies. But the bottom line is schools have the authority to regulate what comes on school property, which includes any electronic device. They also have the authority to ban them. But reviewing a text message or e-mail is a gray area.

“It is not a simple area to deal with and there’s so many ifs involved,” he said. “Simply seizing a text messaging instrument to simply – out of curiosity – see what is going on, I think, that could be a problem. But if there has been some type of threat or something else that would be disruptive to the educational setting and the principal is in the process of trying to investigate that, then maybe not.”

In the Lawrence school district, policies regarding electronic devices are left up to each school. In general, most schools do not allow use of items such as cell phones during class time but differ on whether students can use them during lunch break or between classes. The punishments vary slightly, but most offenders get their devices taken away for the day.

Lawrence High School allows the use of electronic devices before and after school, during lunch and during class with the permission of a teacher. Students are not allowed to use them between classes.

“We thought it was good for students to actually interact with each other, to actually look up and make sure they weren’t running into somebody,” said Steve Nilhas, LHS principal.

If students are caught disobeying the rules, the electronic device is confiscated until the next day. He said parents can pick them up.

“For the most part, we have tried to look at meeting this halfway – not being overly draconian and not being overly permissive either,” Nilhas said.

New era

Trish Bransky, Southwest Junior High School principal, agrees.

“This is an era when instant communication is important to people and it’s available and I think, we, who didn’t grow up with all of that, need to realize that this is the world now. This is the world that we are living in and will continue to do so. I think we have to make adjustments.”

Caroline King is among the Southwest students who have embraced the electronic era. She said she text messages her friends and family “a lot.”

“To carry on a conversation, it can take more than an hour,” King said.

While Southwest students aren’t supposed to use cell phones during school, King said, they do.

“Most people are smart enough to not get caught with it multiple times in a row because then you have to get your parents to come (pick up your phone),” she said.