Perspective: Treading on student rights

Treading on student rights

Well-publicized incidents of violence have parents worried, but do we really want schools that look like prisons and kids who feel like criminals?

By DIANE STEINLE

When Clearwater High School students returned to class last month after their summer break, they found some additions to their school.

Heavy metal fencing and locking gates enclosed the central portion of the campus. And 48 surveillance cameras kept an electronic eye on the hallways and grounds.

Throughout the Pinellas school district, students are finding more security equipment and law enforcement activity, from cameras in hallways to panic alarms and card entry systems at some schools.

And students may be forgiven for feeling like inmates in a jail. Picture this:

Johnny is sitting in his middle school math class when the door opens and a campus police officer with a dog enters the classroom. Students are told that a search for drugs, weapons and other contraband is about to begin, and they are urged to confess if they are carrying any illegal items. Then all students are ordered to file out of the room. While they wait in the hallway, their personal belongings and the classroom are searched by the officer and a specially trained drug-sniffing dog.

These are random searches, conducted several times a year in each Pinellas middle and high school without any suspicion that illegal items are present. Far from alarmed by this disruption of the classroom environment, the school district is working toward increasing the frequency of searches.

The district's 20-officer Campus Police Department now has five dogs trained to sniff out drugs, weapons or bombs. The canine teams visit any school that requests them but also make surprise visits to schools, where they may spend a whole day doing sniff-searches of classrooms and student lockers. Cigarettes and lighters make up the bulk of forbidden items seized during canine searches.

In at least one Pinellas school, that still wasn't enough. Largo Middle School, which had only two drug-related arrests last year, wanted its own drug-sniffing dog to patrol the hallways and classrooms full time. Parents and staff were so excited that they planned to sell candy bars and wash cars to raise the $3,500 needed for the canine program. Donations already had been collected when the city police department nixed the program.

The increasing security at Pinellas schools is part of an accelerating national movement -- some might say national hysteria -- since a string of school shootings in the last three years, most notably the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999.

Private companies with trained drug dogs are being hired to do dragnet-style sweeps of classrooms, lockers and students' belongings in some districts. In an Arkansas district, students and their belongings are selected at random to be scanned with hand-held metal detectors. In a growing number of schools, students who want to participate in athletics or other extracurricular activities are forced to submit to urine tests for drugs -- to urinate into a container in front of an observer to ensure the urine comes from the student. An Oklahoma school district policy requires a urine test of students who aren't trying out for athletic teams but just want to participate in for-credit activities such as band and chorus.

Last month the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against a Michigan school district for strip searching all students in a gym class in an effort to find money reported missing from the locker room.

"Strip searching students is just the latest in a disturbing series of attacks on students' privacy," said Michael J. Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan ACLU. "High school administrators have recently searched students' backpacks and lockers without cause and subjected students to metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance cameras and drug testing. What's next -- cavity searches?"

How did we make the jump from being legitimately concerned about children's safety at school to regarding students as potential criminals whose every move must be watched?

Over-reaction to Columbine's horrors is no doubt part of the reason, but blame also lies with the nation's courts, which have enabled school districts and law enforcement agencies to encroach steadily on student rights. There has been quite a tumble down the slippery slope since the U.S. Supreme Court declared in the 1969 case, Tinker vs. Des Moines School District, "It can hardly be argued that . . . students shed their constitutional rights . . . at the schoolhouse gate."

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizens the right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures." But public school students no longer have the same rights as the rest of us.

A drug-sniffing dog can be walked around lockers and school grounds without violating the constitutional right to freedom from unreasonable searches, courts have ruled. If the dog alerts after sniffing a student's belongings, that alert provides all the reasonable suspicion officers need to do a physical search and question a student.

A 1985 case, New Jersey vs. T.L.O., often is cited as starting the slide. A student in a New Jersey high school was accused of smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, a violation of school rules. The student denied that she smoked, so an administrator searched her purse and found rolling papers, marijuana and a list of students who owed her money, presumably for supplying them drugs. The student was arrested and later adjudicated delinquent.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the T.L.O. case that public school students do have some constitutional protection from unreasonable searches, but it is a diminished right. Because school officials are responsible for maintaining a learning environment, which serves the public interest, they have a right to conduct searches without probable cause as long as those searches are reasonable and not excessively intrusive, the court found.

In fact, school officials can use canine sniffs, metal detectors and drug tests for extracurricular activities without any legal justification at all because those actions are not considered intrusive.

Not only have public school students lost the right to be free from such enforcement activity, they put themselves at risk if they object. In California, authorities entered a high school class called Criminal Justice (the irony is not lost here) for a random drug-dog search. When one student objected to having the dog sniff his belongings, his objection was taken as a reasonable suspicion that he was hiding something. He was searched, but nothing was found. The case resulted in a lawsuit.

It is every parent's worst nightmare to imagine violence breaking out in his or her child's school. School shootings, though rare, have been so well-publicized that the nightmare has become real for parents. No wonder some parents and school officials are so ready to sacrifice students' privacy and the traditional nurturing environment of the classroom in a desperate search for ways to buttress schools from society's ills.

The Sept. 1 edition of Family Circle magazine reported the results of a recent survey relating to school safety. According to the magazine, 76 percent of those surveyed believed random drug testing should be allowed in high schools. And a whopping 94 percent supported the use of metal detectors in schools.

But is this really what we want -- schools that look like correctional institutions and kids who feel like criminals? It costs $90,000 to equip a standard high school with surveillance cameras. Is that how we want our dollars spent -- on ever larger school police forces and drug-sniffing dogs and the latest security gadgets -- when teacher pay is too low and classes are too large?

It is not an Orwellian leap to imagine schools of the future as places where students will be subjected to strip searches, forced interrogations, mandatory drug tests -- perhaps even the cavity searches mentioned by the Michigan ACLU's Steinberg.

Joseph Feraca, chief of Pinellas County's Campus Police Department, admits to some ambivalence about the trends.

"I want students to have the ability to come and go and enjoy their lives, because the most important part of their lives is right here," he said. "But society has become more violent. You have to be proactive."

So far, people seem alarmingly comfortable with increasing fortification of schools and encroachment on students' rights even though, statistically, children are far more likely to be victims of domestic violence than school violence.

One of the most important lessons schools should teach students is that we the people are protected from unreasonable government intrusion in our lives by the blessings of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. But in today's classrooms, we may be teaching children something else entirely. It is frightening to imagine the long-term consequences if our children come to believe that the heavy hand of government they feel inside their schools should be applied to the general population outside as well.

Ironically, potential violence in schools still often is averted not by high-tech security measures, but the old-fashioned way: A student hears or sees something worrisome and tells a teacher or administrator. As such, the complicated question of how we can make schools safer may be best answered with simple solutions, ones that do no harm. We could substantially improve school safety at little cost by setting up better systems for students to quickly and anonymously report things they see and hear. And rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars on security cameras and drug dogs and further armoring of public schools, we might be better off to invest in more guidance counselors, nurses and psychologists who can be of real help to troubled students and their families.

At Clearwater High a week ago, a 17-year-old student with a criminal record was charged with carrying a loaded handgun in his backpack on the campus. The incident no doubt further heightened some parents' anxieties about the potential dangers students face, but the way it was safely resolved is also telling. The gun was not found through use of the new surveillance cameras or weapon-sniffing dogs. It was found because a student learned about it and told someone in authority.

Unfortunately, no system will be foolproof. But schools still house, for the most part, eager young people who want to learn. We don't need to treat them all like criminals.

Diane Steinle is editor of editorials for the North Pinellas editions of the St. Petersburg Times.