Article from Reason by Lenore Skenazy.

A 13-year-old hauled into the principal’s office for not serving his detention may end up with the biggest detention of all: a felony conviction. That’s because the kid recorded the conversation on his phone.

The incident took place last February at Manteno Middle School, which is about an hour outside of Chicago. Young Paul Boron was arguing with Principal David Conrad and Assistant Principal Nathan Short.

According to the Illinois Policy Center:

Two months later, in April, Boron was charged with one count of eavesdropping – a class 4 felony in Illinois.

Unfortunately for Boron, there is a law against recording people without their consent in Illinois. There’s even a rule against it in the student handbook. But the handbook also says that it is fine for the school to have video cameras monitoring the public areas of the building. In other words, it’s fine to keep the kids under constant surveillance, just not the administrators.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Jamelle Bouie [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons