Update On School Strip-Searching

[Eldezar]

Here is the original thread. (http://forum.nuklearpower.com/showthread.php?t=33191)

And here are some new articles that came up in the past two months.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/us/24savana.html
http://www.thehilltoponline.com/girl-strip-searched-at-school-case-reaches-supreme-court-this-week-1.1723400
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/22search.html?_r=1&hpw

some snippets:

The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”

Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on April 21.

The case will require the justices to consider the thorny question of just how much leeway school officials should have in policing zero-tolerance policies for drugs and violence, and the court is likely to provide important guidance to schools around the nation.

...

Justice Breyer elaborated on what children put in their underwear. “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day,” he said. “We changed for gym, O.K.? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.”

The courtroom rocked with laughter, and the justice grew a little flustered at having apparently misspoken.

While Supreme Court arguments can often be bone-dry exercises in statutory exegesis and doctrinal refinement, Tuesday’s session was grounded in vivid facts: school snitches, drugs, underwear and body cavities.

None of the lawyers had a particularly easy time of it. Matthew W. Wright, representing the school district, said that intimate searches should be allowed even for the most common over-the-counter drugs.

...

“You search in the student’s pack, you search the student’s outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs,” he said. “Don’t you have, after conducting all these other searches, a reasonable suspicion that she has drugs in her underpants?”

“You’ve searched everywhere else,” Justice Scalia said. “By God, the drugs must be in her underpants.”

I still haven't found the official ruling, unless I missed it somewhere in the articles, but as far as I can tell their still discussing.

[ChaosMage]

Question: Was Scalia being sarcastic? I can't tell. If he's being serious, that man....*ugh* I don't think he is, by how I'm reading that last article
“You search in the student’s pack, you search the student’s outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs,” he said. “Don’t you have, after conducting all these other searches, a reasonable suspicion that she has drugs in her underpants?”

“You’ve searched everywhere else,” Justice Scalia said. “By God, the drugs must be in her underpants.”

Then again, the man is something of a hypocrite when it comes to privacy laws (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/6/721853/-Scalia-Owned-by-Students,-Flips-Out!).

Lets parse this. 4th Amendment: Unreasonable search = bad.

Does one student saying to a teacher, "I got the pills from X!" in order to avoid punishment constitute right to search? My guess is that courts would say yes, regardless of whether the source is reliable.

Next question. You're going on a somewhat iffy tip on a student distribution some kind of pill. You search backpack/purse/pockets. I think we can all agree those are legally permitted, and even if we can't, the Supreme Court says it is, and so it must be.

No pills turned up yet. The question you'd have to weigh as a justice of the SCOTUS is this: At what point are you allowed to do a more intrusive search? Never? Only with a search warrant? With a 'reasonable' amount of suspicion? What constitutes reasonable?

[bluestarultor]

There is no question in my mind that body cavity searches should be off-limits. That's just plain humiliating and unnecessary. At the very least, a warrant should be obtained and the parents should be not only informed, but given a chance to come over.

It really pisses me off that schools have become police, judge, jury, and executioner these days. I personally went to a school district that abused the hell out of it. Frankly, the place should really be shut down for all the crap they do.

The worst part is that this wasn't even over hard drugs. It was over ibuprophen, which is about as good at being dangerous to our youth as kids' vitamins, or less so, since the overdose rating is, I assume, lower than iron-related deaths. There was no reason the school should have had nearly that much leeway, and I sincerely hope the Court agrees with me and takes remedial action.

[ChaosMage]

The way I'm reading the article is that they didn't know that they were ibuprofen, and that recently a kid had gotten sick off of some pills he took that he was given at school.

[bluestarultor]

The way I'm reading the article is that they didn't know that they were ibuprofen, and that recently a kid had gotten sick off of some pills he took that he was given at school.

I'm pretty sure they knew what they were, but schools have gone totally fascist over here in terms of medication. You can't even have cough drops on your person in many places. If it's any kind of medication, it needs to be kept in the nurse's office, with a doctor's or at least parent's note saying that it was given to you by an adult. This actually caused a lot of problems with a diabetic friend of mine, because the teachers didn't like releasing him so he could get his insulin, to the point where his parents told the school district that the teachers could either release him from class to get it or release him from class so he could go to the hospital and be treated for insulin shock, because he was leaving class one way or another (after which he was "expelled," no hearing, active student ID and lunch account, because they didn't want to deal with him).

The same applies to things like rescue inhalers for asthmatics, insulin and testing devices for diabetics, cough drops, aspirin, and everything short of Tic-Tacs.

[Marelo]

All of which is just incredibly messed up.

The most extreme my school got was banning outside drinks for fear of smuggling in alcohol... but most of the teachers thought it was stupid and didn't even enforce it.

[Rymramoch]

The high-school I went to did not allow us to have ibuprofen, etc, but they did allow things like rescue inhalers and epi-pens. Blue, I am surprised that your school was allowed/is allowed to get away with that, as without those it is not unreasonable to believe that a student could be put in a life-threatening situation, or even die.

[ChaosMage]

My school didn't allow us to have ibuprofen or anything else. Even teachers thought it was stupid and you could pretty much get away with anything as long as you could show it was innocuous or you had a prescription. Or if you were known as a good student like I was (I once got yelled at for antibiotics, and I pretty much just ignored the person).

[Spekkio]

It's my opinion that allowing schools that much leeway is dangerous for larger reasons than just the emotional well-being of the nation's children. The way I see it, the courts' constant upholding of a school's "right" to interfere in the privacy of its students, which is something I feel only a parent should be allowed to do, (or perhaps a school, with a parent's case-by-case consent) and allowing them to otherwise rule over students completely, is indicative of a growing attitude within not just the schools and judicial system, but government in general, that any authority should be absolute authority. What's worse, whether by accident, coincidence, or intention, enforcing these unreasonable systems on these students in their formative years primes them to accept the idea later in life that they have to both literally and figuratively bend over, and take it.

Even people who like big government tend to agree, by and large, that there needs to be some limitation on government power. This attitude that schools have absolute authority over their students is anathema to the concept of limited government. A student literally has no rights at all in a modern school. I have NEVER seen a school handbook with a section detailing what authority figures within that school could NOT do to a student. However, there is a gracious plenty about what a student may not do, usually with the accepted implication that a failure to explicitly list any given activity as something that may be done means that it automatically belongs among the "may nots", even if it is not listed there.

Acclimating children to the idea that they absolutely must bend to the will of an authority figure in all circumstances, even if that authority figure is wrong, is dangerous to a free society. In this particular example, every student at that school is suffering an erosion of his or her consciousness of the idea that they have a right to resist unreasonable search and seizure and/or invasion of privacy.

I'm not advocating giving kids the right to refuse a reasonable search. Reasonable searches are just as important to the health and safety of free people as is the right to refuse unreasonable ones. If a kid smells like pot or crack, or is acting high, then by all means, he should be searched. Furthermore, in my opinion, every school that doesn't have a metal detector and at least two armed guards at every entrance should be shut down, but that's a different topic.

[bluestarultor]

The high-school I went to did not allow us to have ibuprofen, etc, but they did allow things like rescue inhalers and epi-pens. Blue, I am surprised that your school was allowed/is allowed to get away with that, as without those it is not unreasonable to believe that a student could be put in a life-threatening situation, or even die.

My school district (which will not be named due to fear of defamation) was and still is very good about sweeping shit under the rug. My senior year, the only one where I didn't get pigeonholed into taking band yet again, the band instructor actually threw his two-legged stand into the ranks of sitting students. Nothing came of it. In fact the idiots were all so brainwashed that they defended him for it. (That brainwashing was part of the reason I left, because I didn't fall into it and made it a point to call him out on his bullshit, but nobody else seemed to be able to pull themselves away from worshiping him to notice.)

I've known or met several people who were falsely expelled, had their lockers cleaned out under school authority and got their stuff stolen by the people doing it, and other things of illegal nature. I have never heard of any school getting away with what they do, but they're an incredibly powerful enemy. I was lucky to be a good student, which was a ticket onto their good side, which gave me a lot of leeway.

[Lumenskir]

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: "the school could keep records on its students, like the police keep records on confidential informants, so unless this student had a proven record of having accurately ratted out a certain number of classmates in the past, she couldn't be believed."
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer: "why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?"
[Phil Ken Sebben]Ha Ha, The Law![/Phil Ken Sebben]

No, but seriously, I've tried to stop following this because it just sort of baffles me how people appointed to spend the rest of their lives carefully scrutinizing the law can say things like this. Kind of makes me glad I switched from constitutional law to contracts.

[Fifthfiend]

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: "the school could keep records on its students, like the police keep records on confidential informants, so unless this student had a proven record of having accurately ratted out a certain number of classmates in the past, she couldn't be believed."
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer: "why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?"

Remember gang, Sonia Sotomayor can't possibly be as qualified as the white, male legal supergeniuses heading our current court.

[Nique]

Wow. I mean, they're doin' it wrong.

This is the torture thread all over again. You don't stop drug use/ trade/ whatever by doing strip searches on students, you accomplish nothing aside from maybe some damage control? It's a sign of lost control, it's a waste of resources and it's just wrong.

There are better ways to deal with this.

[bluestarultor]

Remember gang, Sonia Sotomayor can't possibly be as qualified as the white, male legal supergeniuses heading our current court.

Yeah, God help us if we got someone SANE in there. :shifty:

Seriously, those statements disgust me. There is a BIG difference between stripping to your underwear in a private locker room with only your peers around you and doing so while scared and alone in front of strange adults who are wielding the expulsion hammer over you.

[Fifthfiend]

Shit it ain't even like the locker room was ever that huge of a picnic, especially in middle school it was totally like "everyone hunch the fuck over and do this shit real quick while pretending nobody else is there."

[pochercoaster]

I'm... totally speechless and horrified. I had no idea it was commonplace in the States to forbid students from bringing in painkillers or to force them to keep them in the nurses office. If I didn't have ibuprofen handy I wouldn't have been able to concentrate in class during certain times of the month due to really annoying and painful cramps. And there are plenty of asthmatics who need to have their inhalers on them because sometimes they need them to save their life. I also knew a kid who had to take heavy painkillers regularly because he had a painful spinal defect.

I mean, I don't know what to say. I am disinclined to ever having children because it seems increasingly difficult to raise them in a sane world. I would not bring a child into this world unless I had the means to home school them or relocate so they could attend a school that has its head on straight.

Man, I remember when my school tried to implement a no-hats rule. Half the teachers didn't care and the entire student body protested, and eventually the rule was shot down. We were one of two schools in the district without cameras. May I also note that despite being one of the poorer schools, on average our students received moderately high marks and there was a very low rate of violent incidents. One of my friends transferred to our school in her senior year and commented on how much slacker the rules were and also how much more helpful and friendlier the teachers were. It's been two years since I graduated and I have one of my former teachers on facebook and I occasionally drop by her class after hours to have coffee with her. There's definitely less of a barrier between students and teachers.

Seems to me that schools are designed to drive children insane, and in response to tragedies such as shootings they increase security and drive children even more insane. It's a vicious cycle and my only hope is that it eventually implodes on itself.

[Tev]

I'm... totally speechless and horrified. I had no idea it was commonplace in the States to forbid students from bringing in painkillers or to force them to keep them in the nurses office.It's not as commonplace as you think. Blue just lives in a repressive district. The districts I went through were not nearly as bad as he has it and my town was on a big drug highway between Chicago and St. Louis.

[pochercoaster]

Yeah, I suppose it depends where you are in the States. It might also be more common than I think around here, especially in the Toronto area, but I haven't researched it.

[Marc v4.0]

It's a little disgusting when you have to start teaching your children that, no, you can't really trust teachers to have your interests anymore. I can remember all those cartoony PSAs on Saturday morning tell us if someone was hurting us or touching us inappropriatly that we need to tell a teacher or parent.

Not anymore, not when a school official can be allowed, maybe even legally privledged, to strip a child naked on the shittiest of unreasonable suspicion. These people aren't the parents, they aren't legal guardians.

We take people to trial and lock them up as sexual offenders when they touch little kids or make them get naked for their pleasure, but we're gonna let strangers that our children are FORCED to interact with decide at their discretion to make our kids strip down nude? WITHOUT even making sure the parents are there!? We might even give them a big goverment "GO!" pass on it if things go their way in Court? That's all we need, closet pedos getting their rocks off legally to our children.

Well, Fuck That. It'll be one of the first things I teach my children before they start going to school to NEVER allow anyone to do this to them, and if they have to kick and fight and scream and run that I won't care.

[Lumenskir]

Shit it ain't even like the locker room was ever that huge of a picnic, especially in middle school it was totally like "everyone hunch the fuck over and do this shit real quick while pretending nobody else is there."
As the Slate Supreme Court reporter basically laid it out, the only way possible to comprehend such stupid statements is to assume that a majority of the Supreme Court, the highest body of judicial power and wisdom in the U.S.A., really believes that the sequence in Road Trip where the girls walk around blissfully naked and carefree in the shower was a documentary excerpt.

[Solid Snake]

Bah, stop making me feel so terrible about my decision to go to Law School. >.>

[Lumenskir]

Bah, stop making me feel so terrible about my decision to go to Law School. >.>
As I'm in it, I can't really say that it's stupid to be in it, just that it's currently pretty stupid to want to focus on Con Law.

I mean, I harbored dreams of taking some free speech case through harrowing appeal after appeal, engendering supports and cascades of amicus curiae for my side, but after reading cases like this one I realized that if I ever did get to the Supreme Court the transcript would be something like.
Lumenskir: Your Justices, as you can see in my notes, we have this Bill of Rights-
Justice: Lemme just cut you off real quick, where does it say the Constitution we can't make teenage girls strip down naked in front of leering adults without parental n-OHMYGODMYNECKYOU'RECHOKINGMYNECKWITHYOURHANDS!

I mean, at least in contracts I have the option of working at some soulless corporate megalith for enough 170 hour work weeks that they eventually take pity on me and give me a window office from which to assign all of my work to lesser law school graduates whilst I snort coke off Thai hookers's secondary sex characteristics.

EDIT: To get somewhat more Discussion-y, the makeup of the Supreme Court has recently morphed into this group of people who don't decide things in terms of individual interpretations of the law but rather two diametrically opposed blobs fighting over the last remaining blob. I mean, sure, it's always been like that minus the periods where a bunch of Justices croaked during one lucky guy's presidency run, but the Court gets built up into this shining beacon of non-partisanship that's supposed to keep the other two idiot branches in check that when you enter one of these dark periods of ultra judicial party fighting it's sort of depressing...

[P-Sleazy]

It's a little disgusting when you have to start teaching your children that, no, you can't really trust teachers to have your interests anymore. I can remember all those cartoony PSAs on Saturday morning tell us if someone was hurting us or touching us inappropriatly that we need to tell a teacher or parent.

Not anymore, not when a school official can be allowed, maybe even legally privledged, to strip a child naked on the shittiest of unreasonable suspicion. These people aren't the parents, they aren't legal guardians.

We take people to trial and lock them up as sexual offenders when they touch little kids or make them get naked for their pleasure, but we're gonna let strangers that our children are FORCED to interact with decide at their discretion to make our kids strip down nude? WITHOUT even making sure the parents are there!? We might even give them a big goverment "GO!" pass on it if things go their way in Court? That's all we need, closet pedos getting their rocks off legally to our children.

Well, Fuck That. It'll be one of the first things I teach my children before they start going to school to NEVER allow anyone to do this to them, and if they have to kick and fight and scream and run that I won't care.

Okay, first thing, in defense of teachers. Its not the teachers who are performing the strip searches. Many of the things teachers have to do that we don't like, they don't like either. And they do them because the higher ups (school administration, state officials, etc) told them they have to. Like Standardized testing. Most teachers (if not all) will tell you they hate having to give up class time to administer these tests.

Second thing. As for the people who actually are performing the search, it isn't the teacher. They just report what they have to. The people who do perform the search is usually someone very high up in the schools administration or the School police officer, or the school nurse/doctor. So two of the three professions already do this as part of thier career (albeit, one does it to willing patients who want to know if everything is right down there, and the other does it to people who are in official police custody) and the third is probably handling confidential information on the student.

[Eldezar]

My school district wasn't near as bad as Blue's, but still pretty shitty. I was personally framed for having a hit-list in the 8th grade, and the Dean searched my locker, my bag empty my pockets and had me take my socks and shoes off. didn't go any further. Luckily, I think my Dean understood I was being harassed, as I was literally the least popular kid in my class, and I think he only went that far to say that he did in case it came up. Granted, I never realized at the time that I could have done more against the students picking on me.

However, the same thing with no pills of any kind at my school without permission and in nurse's office. No food or drink that wasn't from the school vending machines or cafeteria, and a few other things. They never went as far as to forbid someone their insulin or inhaler.

I could go on and on about other crap, but you get the idea. Basically, though, unless a major overhaul is done to the school system, or I end up in a district that I am positive won't screw up my kid, then their getting home schooled.

[Rymramoch]

If you home-school your kid, just make sure to socialize them. Without regular interaction with people their age, kids can grow up kinda weird and without any real idea of what can/cannot be appropriate. I saw a couple home-schooled kids at my college who started out as straight-arrows, and then dove head first into booze etc. so hard that they were expelled by the end of freshman year.

[Marelo]

Just want to reiterate that socialization is a must for homeschooling.

Also, by all freakin' means, unless you are a professional teacher, do not actually try to teach them yourself. That's how you end up with 11 year old kids who can't read at a second grade level, with siblings entering 8th grade who can't find North America on a map or figure out fractions (true story, I'm a family friend). There are plenty of programs, a lot of them through actual schools, which can do a much better job than an amateur.

[pochercoaster]

I would think that if you homeschooled your kids they'd have more time to be socialized- i.e. it doesn't take 6 hours to teach a single child what the curriculum dictates they must learn in a single day, but it does take 6 hours to teach 30 of them. Additionally, you can spend extra time on whatever subjects they're having difficulty in, and also move on to more advanced material in the subjects they grasp easily. Any leftover time you have can be spent taking them to the park/swimming lessons/playdates/whatever.

Course when people hear "homeschooled" a lot of them think of kids raised by crazy overprotective parents or evangelists, but that's certainly not always the case. And judging by some of the rules schools are implementing lately, I'd say they're being overprotective at times.

[Lady Cygnet]

Also, by all freakin' means, unless you are a professional teacher, do not actually try to teach them yourself. That's how you end up with 11 year old kids who can't read at a second grade level, with siblings entering 8th grade who can't find North America on a map or figure out fractions (true story, I'm a family friend). There are plenty of programs, a lot of them through actual schools, which can do a much better job than an amateur.

Ironically, I've worked with kids who have been taught in public schools in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri, and they have those exact same problems: they cannot read at the level for their age group, they cannot do simple math, and God help you if you ask them to identify any countries, states, or state capitals on a map.

Ignorant people shouldn't be teaching, true, but not everyone has to be a professional teacher to do a good job of homeschooling their children, especially when the public schools are such a mess.

[krogothwolf]

I'm a little glad Canada isn't that bad in teaching the youngens. At least it wasn't when I went through our schooling system. I have noticed Americans coming to canada from was Texas and Arkansa i believe and being about 2 or 3 grades behind us in math and such. You guys have some of the Greatest Universities in the world it always boggled my mind when kids coming here couldn't do basic math in grade 7 so I always thought Americans were just idiots. Of course I have since been proven wrong on that.

Canadian home school is actually usually worse then our public schooling as parents skip out on to much crap that they don't know themselves. One person would be hard pressed teach a kid all 4 major subjects

[Marelo]

That's kind of what I was trying to get at. Too many people think they can teach their kids, when they don't know what they're supposed to be teaching.

[Lady Cygnet]

School used to be better when I was younger. Then again, there was more parental involvement and less blaming of schools when people's special snowflakes failed or got into trouble. My niece hasn't been doing well in school, but my sister knows that it's not the school's fault, and she doesn't treat the school like it is their fault. I think it's more a case of not enough teachers for amount of kids in school mixed with a hefty dose of parents dumping their responsibility for their kids' education solely on the school. It should always be a team effort. I'm trying to do what I can to help my niece do better, but she's resistant to talking about schoolwork. She passed this year, but just barely. I'm hoping that once August rolls around, I can get her in a position where she is ready to make it her best year ever. She'll be in the eighth grade, and if she wants to go to college, she's going to have to work harder than she has in the past, and my sister will have to do all she can to make sure she's doing the work and doing her best each day.

[Nique]

Man speaking of, my highschool is just going down the drain. Every year something get's worse.

It used to be a magnet school with a emphasis on vocational majors, and you had to apply to get in, although it was still part of the public school system. Since it preformed so well, and the rest of the district DIDN'T, they thought they should mix things up and force the school to admit students via a lottery.

Now it's preforming so poorly they are considering converting it into a 2-year trade school with even LESS funding than it currently gets. I'm glad my brother is graduating this year.

[Magus]

Something I really can't understand in all of this: since schools so often run into legal wrangling over these strip searches, why can't they simply contact the state police/local police and have them conduct the investigation? Why take the power (and the responsibility) into your own hands if you don't have to?

The reason, of course, is the searches are probably quite unfounded as far as actual evidence goes, and therefore unreasonable, and therefore the state police won't do the search since there isn't any actual reasonable suspicion in the first place. I.e., the school officials are probably incompetent/over reaching in their rights.

After all, it's hard to argue for "acting as parents and guardians during the school day" when the actual parents and guardians find fault with you and sue you for strip searches of their children.

EDIT: BTW, I wouldn't include the school's police officer in the definition of state police/local police. While they are often derived from a source such as that I would say there's a conflict of interest and be on the safe side and not try to use my school's police officer.

[Kepor]

The Supreme Court has ruled that the strip search was unreasonable and intrusive. The decision was 8-1, with Clarence Thomas voting against. It was a rather limited decision though; school officials will not be held liable, and a lower court will have to decide if the school district will be held liable. Likewise, the Supreme Court didn't set any new guidelines.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/25/AR2009062501690.html?hpid=moreheadlines

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/25/2009-06-25_supreme_court_rules_schools_strip_search_of_tee n_savana_redding_unconstitutional.html

[Eldezar]

So pretty much nothing has changed, and the Supreme court simply made a ruling to prevent this kind of case from reaching them because they don't want to deal with it again. Nice job.