I got my smartphone in the summer leading up to sixth grade and ever since, as bad as it sounds, I’ve been attached to it. I communicate via text messages and write down my thoughts in notes. I keep a montage of my life in photos. I keep my passwords and my medical history and my calendars on it. A stranger could get to know me better than most of my friends by searching through my iPhone.

Something that comes with cellphones is an expectation of privacy. Privacy is something everyone relies on when it comes to their phones.

Little did I know that what I expected to be private is really not. The usual standard that law enforcement officers must reach to conduct a search is not required of educators when it comes to phones and social media.

On January 1, 2015, a bill went into effect that requires students to give their social media passwords to their school if, according to the Court’s ruling, “reasonable grounds for believing that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school.”

But what does “reasonable grounds” really mean? The phrase is completely subjective. “Reasonable” could be twisted in any way, shape, or form. A school in Kentucky, for example, searched through a boy’s phone just because he was texting during class.

From overhearing conversations about the topic and noticing articles online, I realized that Parker hasn’t expressed any specific protection of privacy, especially when it comes to cell phones or social media.

In Parker’s Upper School Community Statement on Rights and Responsibilities in the Parent/Student Handbook, it states, twice, that no students locker will be searched without the students permission, administrative permission, or “in the event that there is reason to believe that a student is holding in his locker items that pose a physical threat to the community.”

The handbook later says that “students shall retain a reasonable expectation of privacy.” Yet this is only specified for searches of lockers, which seems useless, due to the fact that hardly anyone even uses a lock on their locker at school.

But every single person I know at Parker has a lock on their phone. If Parker is as keen on the idea of privacy as it says it is, then it would apply the terms of its statement to an aspect that really matters, such as cellphones.