One can argue the exact contours of the rights of students at school, but this case before the Supreme Court really shouldnÂ’t take much time to decide.

Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on — black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt — the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade.

An assistant principal, enforcing the schoolÂ’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.

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.

Oh.

Come.

On.

No person with even a lick of common sense, much less an understanding of the Constitutional prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures by government officials, can believe that such conduct is permissible. There was no basis for believing that there were drugs hidden in her underwear, nor was the medication she was suspected of having anything that could be seen as posing a serious threat to the health or safety of any student. In short, there was no pressing emergency that required this extreme measure – and any properly trained administrator ought to have known that.

Now I realize that courts have ruled that the parameters of student rights at school are different than those available to adults – and I think that sometimes the courts have erred in where they have drawn the boundaries. Indeed, the very concept of in loco parentis gives schools some pretty expansive leeway in dealing with students. But this isn’t a search of a school-owned locker or a car with a parking permit – or even of a purse or backpack. This is a particularly invasive search that shocks the conscience. For the Supreme Court to rule in any other manner than that this search violated the Constitution – and that the school personnel involved should be personally liable for their actions – would be a grave miscarriage of justice.

H/T Hot Air, Just One Minute

Posted by: Greg at 12:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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