As for being sued, one can only be sued for actual damages. If no consequences arose from the act, then it is not actionable. It is a violation of federal communications law to record a telephone conversation without the other party’s knowledge or consent, and a violation of this law can be applied to support a civil action. But it would not be a criminal act, unless the consequences warranted criminal charges against the perpetrator.
Of course, if she simply went to another room and listened, but did not record, that’s another kettle of fish.
If she’s stupid enough to confess to what she did and put it in writing and sign it, then yes she’s committing an illegal act. however, if there’s no recording, no proof other than people’s testimony that she said she bugged live rather than recorded, then - where’s the case? (If she has any brain left, as soon as people start mentioning laws, she will erase any evidence).
Plus, does bugging by activiating your own phone fall in the same category as planting hidden microphones? Even if it’s under some papers, people knew there’s a phone there.
i would suggest work discipline is in order, but I have trouble imagining there being a legal case unless she admits it. Even then, it sounds more like medical help is needed instead.
I’m curious as to how you parse the distinction between these two states.
I’ve been dispatched to schools, both public and private, as well as to colleges, to take reports on various things. While I wouldn’t say “most” like you do I can say there is a good amount of teachers who are bat-shit crazy, with weird emotional statuses and bizarre understandings of actuality.
my boss has done it with this app (Record audio like a ninja with L'il Sneaky for iPhone | iMore). I wonder why, if it is illegal, there is an app allowed to exist for this very purpose?
First of all, it’s not slander or liable. Perhaps “outrage” or “Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress,” or “public exposure of private facts.” Also, there might be a private right of action for violation of the consent statute.
Second of all, it’s not always true that you need actual damages to sue. See the following from the Notes to the Alaska Pattern Jury instructions:
Because in most states it is not illegal to secretly record a conversation you are a part of. It is only illegal to secretly record a conversation you are not a part of and no one else has been advised of the recording.
Talking to people and having an active, hidden recording device on you is generally not illegal. Hiding the device in the room and leaving while it records generally is illegal.
That app doesn’t do anything a common tape recorder doesn’t do.
Thank you everyone, for all the information. I’m not sure about the others, but I’m going to let them know that my first step is going to be an informal meeting with a lawyer, and then a meeting with my principal. I just wanted to go in informed. If the ‘higher ups’ at the board get involved, they are often more concerned with covering their own butts, so I wanted to be able to know my rights and know the law. The education system is set up so it kind of has its own set of laws, and they focus more on protecting the system itself rather than on always doing what’s best for the kids or their employees. It’s not any individuals fault, it’s the system in general that works that way.
Anyway, thank you everyone. From what I’ve learned on here and found online I can go in basically knowing KY is a ‘one party consent’ state, so her being out of the room and using an electronic device to record a private conversation, with no one being recorded having given consent, she broke the law. But without the actual recordings or a person she admitted her actions to, we probably won’t be able to do anything legally. But there is enough that hopefully the school will take action or at least find a way to make her seek help.
it is different from a tape recorder in that records without anyone knowing. And the reason is to leave it out when you aren’t in the room so you can hear what others are saying while you aren’t there.
Like you said, without proof, there’s likely not much you can do about it. My suggestion is that you A)Just don’t talk about her anymore and B)Maybe start taking your lunchbreaks in a different room each day.
The thing is that both of these things are likely to driver her even battier. If you just stop talking about her altogether and she has problems there’s a good chance she’s going to REALLY think you’re talking about her and if you start having lunch in a different room each day she’ll wonder why. On the one hand, you don’t want to make an unstable person even more unstable, OTOH, if someone is recording your conversations to catch you talking about her, there’s nothing wrong with going out of your way to not talk about her and having lunch in a room that isn’t bugged.
No it isn’t. I have a digital tape recorder that I can turn on and leave on in my pocket. It is voice activated so it only records when conversation starts.
I could easily put it in a bag or box or whatever and leave it running in a room after I’m gone.
It is not illegal to have a device that records conversations, even surreptitiously. It is illegal to use such a device in a manner that contravenes laws in that location.
You could take the other route. Start throwing her name into every couple of sentences at random. Make so much noise that she can’t find a signal.
I don’t know, but this quote is from a newspaper in Kentucky, covering an almost identical situation. 
“Under Kentucky law, eavesdropping is a Class D felony, and divulging illegally obtained information is a Class A misdemeanor.”
I’m not condoning what your co-worker has done…but you’re really gonna advance this to that kind of level? How have you been harmed? Did you say anything about her that you wouldn’t say to her face? This seems like petty co-worker relationship shit here. You can’t handle your differences in a civil manner?
In my experience, this is quite typical of the types of work-related issues that teachers get involved in.
Considering she also admitted to rifling through your purse, I’d say it’s more than just recordings. And I’d be almost certain that it’s not just your stuff she’s messing with.
You can be having emotional issues (stress due to certain events) without being actually mentally ill (say, schizophrenia).
I posted this on an academic message board a couple of months ago in response to a question posed by one of my classmates. I think it elaborates on this well, albeit in an indirect manner.
Maddi O’Connell wrote:
My other question is does society pressure us into giving younger children material that is not at their learning level?
In my opinion, that’s a very difficult question to answer, because the answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time. The answer is ‘yes’ when you look at it from the standpoint of the widespread acceptance of standards-based education that has occurred in the United States during the past thirty years. There is absolutely no question that we are placing unreasonable and ridiculous demands on primary and secondary school-aged children in this country in an effort to advance our own financial interests. To quote an essay that I wrote last semester for CD M14,
The fact that Race to the Top has harmonious bipartisan support demonstrates that Americans as a whole are content to allow public policy makers to scapegoat educators when pressed to explain America’s declining competence in matters of global commerce.
The most tragic result of these absurd accountability measures is that they inflict irreparable damage upon the population that they are ostensibly designed to benefit. I say ‘ostensibly’ because the real motivation behind forcing our children to sacrifice their birthright of having a childhood for the sake of academic accomplishment seeks only to benefit the pocketbooks of their parents. Forty-five years ago we demanded that 18-year-olds be forced to die in Southeast Asia for the sake of DuPont and Bell Aerospace; now we demand that they master numerical integration for the same reason.
So the answer is ‘yes’ in the sense that instead of repairing the deficits that exist in our educational system, we’ve simply compounded the problem by expecting children to achieve absurdly irrational educational goals.
On the other hand, the answer is ‘no,’ because there actually are rock star teachers out there who are capable of doing astonishing things, like going into an inner-city classroom and within a matter of months having every student in the classroom testing out at a level commensurate with Finnish cohorts. Yet these teachers are vanishingly rare, and when they do exist, face a never-ending uphill battle to implement their skills. In The Social Neuroscience of Education (2013), Louis Cozolino states that
As with student bullying, problems among faculty and staff can be a cry for help. Frustrations and other negative emotions in the classroom may be taken out on other adults. Just as with children and adolescents, some teachers may be easy targets of scapegoating because they stand out in some way, have lower status, or are less able to defend themselves. A teacher who feels as if he or she is failing in his work may scapegoat or sabotage another teacher whom he sees as successful. In fact, most exceptional teachers report being the target of anger, jealousy, and even rage, which increased with their success.” (Italics mine.)
Part of the ‘Pink Code of Silence’ that I posited in an earlier post revolves around this very dynamic, namely that there exists an unspoken convention among teachers that setting the bar too high is a quick ticket to professional ostracism. An accomplished teacher is a master of scaffolding; he or she gazes deeply into the innate abilities of every one of his or her students and tailors an individual approach for each of them. He or she sees scaffolding as a complicated dance of interplay, refection, and concrete effect. Like a fencing match with its thrusts, ripostes, feints, and retreats, the effective teacher continually modifies the scaffold in a myriad of instantaneous, subtle adjustments that emerge spontaneously from the interaction itself. But this is far, far too difficult for most teachers to even understand, much less execute. So for this reason, the effective teacher is constantly torn down by intellectually and psychologically inferior colleagues who tell him that his methods are unworkable because they rub these colleagues’ noses in the cold, harsh reality of their own ineptitude.
The bottom line here is that the system as a whole is so inherently defective that a teacher is neither allowed to succeed, nor allowed to fail. The ultimate victims are the innocent children who are forced to accommodate themselves to a system that is by its very nature internally contradictory and ineffective. So while we make nearly impossible demands on our children, at the same time we do everything we possibly can to defeat those rare individuals who can potentially enable them to rise to those selfsame demands.
Of course, you’ve raised a large number of issues here (which I’d very much enjoy discussing at the right time and place - here or elsewhere). I’d probably want to suggest (agree?) that the bizarre external pressures and expectations (i.e. teacher accountability and testing), combined with the fact that the federal and state legislators are creating rules, regulations and mandates about which they know virtually nothing, have made the entire population of schools emotionally unstable. There’s not a business or industry or profession anywhere in the world that is under the relentless negative scrutiny that the edubiz is. It’s like getting booed every time you come to work.
However, I also think that teachers, tend to be pretty small, spend a lot of time complaining, and allow petty, interpersonal matters to fester, escalate, and take up precious time and energy that would be better spent contemplating their instructional plans, schemes, and intentions.
Ok, so what’s the civil way to handle your paranoid-as-fuck coworker who’s been secretly bugging the lounge and who admitted to going through your bag and (at the very least) looking through your schedule book to see if you had any Secret Meeting To Overthrow Paranoid Coworker notes in there? Make her write “I’m sorry for being a paranoid lunatic” on the board 100 times?
Uh…that too. I feel that what it most often really boils down to is that education, and especially ECE, and especially SPED on top of that, is dominated by women who are bitter, angry, and resentful of the fact that they are the type of women who are incapable of attracting alpha males. As you may well imagine, I have caught an insufferable amount of shit for expressing this opinion, but I feel that this is pretty much the root of the problem. And this isn’t mere conjecture on my part; there has been some discussion of this in the professional literature. If you want to start a spin-off thread have at it, but I’m perfectly fine discussing it here as long as the OP is satisfied that his or her question has been adequately answered.
Uh, I’m gonna have to ask you for a link on that one.