Allowing the author of a node to bypass the Taxonomy permissions

I have a site where students are keeping individual journals in the forms of blogs. I'd like them to be able to tag a post as being "private" which would cause it to be visible only to the "Teaching Team" group _and_ to the authoring student. Right now the first goal is being met. Unfortunately as soon as the post is tagged as "private", the original author loses the ability to see it. I imagine that making this work will require a code-level change doing the equivalent of "OR node.uid = current.uid" somewhere. Suggestions or patches would be most helpful. Thanks!