The safety of the many outweighs the privacy of a few
Platte Envoy
Sara Lovelace
Citizen Assistant Editor
Drug testing has always been a touchy subject. In 2010, there was discussion in the North Platte School District to do random drug testing. In 2010-11, they did it and hit a couple positives for drugs along the way. In 2011-12 so far, they’ve had zero – and that’s after testing almost 70 percent of what they did in the last school year.
Like the County’s new initiative last year about being able to test for alcohol without permission at car stops, there have been a couple questions raised about a student’s right to privacy in the North Platte School District since these randomized drug tests began. Does the school district have the right to randomly test students for drug usage?
According to at least two Supreme Court decisions in the last 16 years, apparently they do. In 2002, in Board of Education v. Earls, the Supreme Court held it was constitutional for an Oklahoma school policy to randomly drug test students who participate in competitive, non-athletic extracurricular activities. The Supreme Court ruling (5-4) stated it was “a reasonably effective means of addressing the school district’s legitimate concerns in preventing, deterring and detecting drug use.” One dissenting justice identified the current program — not necessarily the concept of drug testing — as the reason for the dissenting vote.
In 1995, there was Vernonia School District 47 v. Acton, which basically held it was reasonable to randomly test 10 percent of the student athlete body for drug use. Vernonia was seeing a rise of drug use which caused a lot of injuries, among athletes especially. Ultimately, the Supreme Court decided that the school district was acting in loco parentis to their students, which means they have legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. So to clear it up, it is the parents’ responsibility to make sure their children are not taking drugs and the parent transfers some of their parenting authority to the school district to ensure the welfare of the child in question, including their safety.
In laymen’s terms, for eight or so hours a school day, your school district is your enforcing presence. A district is given permission to punish students for various things, but until they turn 18, they are still minors by law and someone has legal responsibility for them. A parent has a reasonable expectation a school district will protect their children while they are under the district’s authority and any student who would test positive on a school district campus for being under the influence of a drug that is either illegal or not prescribed to them is under the influence of an unmonitored, potentially hazardous substance.
Drugs alter the body’s chemistry, so an argument could be made that nobody is really sure how they will react. Dosages, purities and other factors handled in a laboratory setting help to regulate a drug’s effects, and the students aren’t being monitored in their drug usage like they would be if the drugs were prescribed. With that thought in mind, it is in the best interest of the school district, the student and their classmates to be tested to protect against injury and unknown drug-induced reactions on the student.
And, as a side note, it should be random and not selective to protect against singling out a child. Privacy can be given to a degree as it can ensure it’s not the same student over and over again — all students participating in the pool as defined by the School Board (by including all or just students participating in extracurricular activities, for example) have an equal chance of being tested. And now the biggest argument — drug searches themselves fall under the Fourth Amendment for protecting people against unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. Usually, this requires a warrant to establish probable cause, but special circumstances can make that obsolete. Otherwise, parents wouldn’t be able to enter their children’s rooms.
So we’re back to in parentis loco again — transferring some of the parental authority from parent to school districts during times the student is under the care of the district.
Additionally, the Fourth Amendment only applies if there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Students should expect less privacy in their public schools than in their private homes. Should an administrator still have to ask a student to search their bags? Yes. However, sometimes the safety of many must balance against the privacy of one — and remember, a school campus carries a lower expectation of privacy because it is a public place.
The students at North Platte can still say they don’t want to be tested, and they won’t be. That is their right. However, they have to be willing to put up with the consequences of that: an automatic positive test. After all, if clean, what do they have to hide and how can the school district be absolutely sure it’s done its best to protect those in its care?
Sara Lovelace is a Citizen Assistant Editor. She may be reached via e-mail at newsdesk@kc.rr.com.
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