Tamika Zollicoffee said her 16-year-old son had never had a run-in with police, but now he may have a record floating in the system because he attended a party near a homicide scene.

Students should not lose their rights when arriving at school, but when police appeared Dec. 8 at Topeka High School with a warrant, they pulled him from class, seized his phone and demanded the passcode.

Zollicoffee said administrators fell short of their duty and that a law enforcement officer abused her son’s trust. Her son wasn’t alone. The warrant listed the names, race and other personal information of 20 students.

“I felt in my soul that this couldn’t be right,” she said during a phone interview. “This is so upsetting to me.”

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The presence of the warrant likely protects police, but repercussions may yet exist for the students. For parents, it appears that police with warrants can question your child at school without notifying you.

Neither the school nor the police department informed her about this incident.

During the public statement portion of a Dec. 16 city council meeting, Zollicoffee expressed frustration with the police department and the school district.

“What happened on Dec. 8th … was totally in my opinion, sloppy, unprofessional and disrespectful to the parents involved,” she said, adding later, “The ball was totally dropped, and I feel totally disrespected. (The police) did it behind our backs.”

Kansas Reflector contacted the city and the school district for comment. Kimberly Qualls, spokeswoman for the city, said, “Due to the pending judicial process related to the case, the Topeka Police Department is unable to provide additional comment at this time.”

The school district did not respond.

Kansas Reflector has not yet seen the warrant.

Lauren Bonds, a civil rights lawyer and executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, said that unfortunately, “there really aren’t strong Fourth Amendment protections in cases like this.”

While some states have passed protections above those set by courts because of how easily police can coerce students into false confessions and wrongful convictions, Kansas is not among those states, Bonds said.

The warrant gave police cover in this instance, and courts likely would find that school officials had no choice but to comply with police entering the school and waving a warrant.

But that doesn’t mean everything that happened was OK.

Bonds said it was reasonable to wonder if being named on a first-degree murder warrant might follow the students around for years. Also, including all the names on one warrant placed students in danger. Again, this was a homicide investigation.

“It’s very much a possibility,” Bonds said.

She added: “The uncertainty here alone is a problem. It is also imposing a burden. That’s incredibly disconcerting.”

Zollicoffee feared this.

“The safety of those students was jeopardized,” she said. “This could be considered a ‘snitch list.’”

Zollicoffee asked the officer she’d tracked down why he would put all the students’ names, race and other personal information in one document.

“He said, ‘It was easier this way,’” she said.

Tyshika Jones, mother of two students who were questioned, doesn’t think so.

“If you would have come and talked to me,” Jones said of the police, “I could have told you that my kids didn’t even have working phones at the time (of the homicide being investigated). I have receipts and everything.”

Jones said the intimidation her daughter faced made matters worse.

“My daughter said she asked three times to speak to me,” Jones said. “She kept asking to talk to me, but the officer snatched the phone out of her hand, because she wasn’t giving it to him, and told her to ‘call her on your own time.’”

Zollicoffee said by not contacting parents, the school district violated its own policy. She quoted 2350-01, the policy that prefers students be questioned outside of business hours and parents to be notified before interrogation.

Parents should have been informed after the questioning as well, Zollicoffee said. That policy has been in place since 1980, and the last revision, she said, was in 2018.

Police attempted to question Jones’ son at Eisenhower Middle School, but administrators didn’t let the officer question him until they’d notified Jones.

Zollicoffee worries about police digging for new cases against the students as they wander through the confiscated phones.

“Couldn’t they just say that they found something and set it aside for a later investigation?” she said.

She believed race and social class played a role in how police behaved. She said the students seemed to be rounded up like cattle and left alone with police. Almost every student on the list was Black, she said.

“If that was a white school, I don’t think they would’ve walked in, grabbed phones and questioned kids without calling their parents,” she said. “We are Black and working class. They just dismissed us.”

Had they been white students from wealthy families, she said, “it wouldn’t have happened this way. Police would have called and spoken to them and given them the respect they deserved.”

She still has not heard from the school system.

Mark McCormick is the former executive director of the Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas.