An Administrator's Guide to California Private School Law

Chapter 10 - Privacy Rights Of Students And Employees

3. E NFORCEMENT O F HIPAA P RIVACY R ULE A ND P ENALTIES F OR V IOLATIONS Compliance with HIPAA’s Privacy Rule is enforced by Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights. This is no private cause of action.

S EARCHES A ND S URVEILLANCE

Section 4

A. S EARCHES O F E MPLOYEE W ORK A REAS Searches of employee property, desks, lockers, and other areas implicate privacy rights. Under the California Constitution, if an employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy, a school may generally not conduct a search except in limited situations. The courts have held that employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in areas that they intend to maintain as private, but an employer’s intrusion may be justified by one or more competing interests. 1734 For example, schools have a legitimate interest in maintaining a safe and efficient campus. LCW Practice Advisor Schools should look carefully at their employee handbooks and related documents to ensure that it has limited the reasonable expectation of privacy of employees. The following cases illustrate how courts have assessed and balanced an employee’s reasonable expectations of privacy against the employer’s interest in an efficient, safe workplace. Hill v. NCAA, 1735 : California Supreme Court Balancing Test The California Supreme Court adopted a “balancing test” approach for analyzing state constitutional privacy claims. This standard is less stringent than the “compelling interest” standard, which under Hill , applies only in limited circumstances. The precise scope of each of these standards is not entirely settled, nor is the extent of an employee’s privacy rights in a workplace setting. The result may depend on the public interest, the employer’s special interests, and the employees’ reasonable expectations of privacy in a particular employment setting. Schowengerdt v. General Dynamics Corp. 1736 : No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy In this case, a civilian Navy engineer’s subjective expectations of privacy in his office, desk and credenza were held not objectively reasonable, given that the Navy employees worked under tight security conditions and were regularly searched. Therefore, the employee’s claim of invasion of privacy based on a warrantless search of his locked desk and credenza did not prevail. Employers should, however, always be careful when relying on court decisions that involve unusual circumstances such as workplaces that require security clearance.

An Administrator’s Guide to California Private School Law ©2019 Liebert Cassidy Whitmore 388