Can school officials require students to surrender Facebook passwords?

A Minnesotta Girl, age 12, was ‘interrogated’ and pressured by school staff to the point where she felt compelled to give the officials her Facebook password. This from a law suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (@ACLU) alleging that the girl’s First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated. As reported by Laura Cox (@misslecox) for the UK’s MailOnline, on reviewing the complaint:

‘R.S. was intimidated, frightened, humiliated and sobbing while she was detained in the small school room’ as she watched a counsellor, a deputy, and another school employee pore over her private communications. The girl claims she felt that one of the school’s adult hall monitors was picking on her, so she wrote on her Facebook wall that she hated the monitor because she was mean.

What gave rise to to the school’s interrogation of this 12 year old?

• The school’s principal seeing a Facebook screenshot of the girl calling a hall monitor mean drawing a suspension;
• A post by the girl, using expletive for effect, asking who turned her in; and
• A third incident where the girl had a conversation about sex on Facebook.

Is that enough to warrant, as alleged in the complaint, to call a 12 year old into meeting, without her parents, with a deputy sheriff, school counsellor and an unidentified employee, where she was intimidated into giving up her login and passwords to her Facebook and e-mail accounts. The school district maintains that such searches did not cross any boundaries. I heard in passing recently that schools had sweeping rights to access students’ social media accounts. Presumably in the face of the students not having sufficient constitutional rights to overcome the schools administration of an educational program and the need to provide for the safety of students and teachers. But this seems to go to far. Perhaps some LXBN lawyers better versed than I on educational law and constitutional law could share their thoughts.