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Tim Post
St. Paul, Minn.

ACLU, student and school district settle lawsuit over Facebook incident

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This picture taken on July 7, 2009 in Paris, shows the front page of the Facebook website.
LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images

The Minnewaska school district in central Minnesota has settled a lawsuit filed by attorneys for a student that school officials disciplined for comments she made on Facebook.

Riley Stratton, 15, will share the $70,000 payment with her attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 2012, Stratton posted on Facebook that she hated a hall monitor. She faced an in-school suspension and was asked to hand over her password so school and law enforcement officials could investigate another online conversation she had with a student.

• Previously: Student's Facebook incident could help form schools' guidelines

School officials maintain they had permission from Stratton's parents to access her account. But Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the ACLU of Minnesota, said school officials violated her Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Riley Stratton
In this photo provided by Sandra Stratton is her daughter Riley Stratton. The Minnewaska, Minn., School District and Riley Stratton, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, announced Tuesday, March 25, 2014 that they have settled a lawsuit that claimed school officials violated the student's constitutional rights by viewing her Facebook and email accounts without permission. The school district has agreed to pay $70,000 to settle the 2012 case involving the former Minnewaska Area Middle School sixth-grader who is now 15 years old.
Courtesy Sandra Stratton/AP

"You have a 12-year old kid, and you've got two adults in a small room — she's locked in there," Samuelson said. "Seriously? That's wrong."

District officials say they have added student electronic communications and records to the list of items administrators can't search without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

Samuelson said he hopes the case changes how school districts respond to such incidents.

"What students do in their private home on their computers is by and large free from interference with the school," he said.