School strip search?

I was absolutely horrified when I read this article in the New York Times today. Never have I been so shocked or disgusted with a school district in my life.

Savana Redding, a now nineteen-year-old girl, was strip searched in by two school officials in eighth grade when she was suspected of carrying prescription strength ibuprofen, which would have violated the school's zero toleration drug policy. She was thirteen years old. Thirteen years old and asked to strip search. In her middle school. Thirteen years old.

That just blows my mind. My sister is turning thirteen this year. I can't even imagine the NMS nurse and secretary searching her body for drugs. That sounds more like a prison than a public school to me.

Savana had apparently been somewhere in between "nerdy" and "preppy" in eighth grade, and when one of her former friends who had turned "goth" was caught with the pills, she blamed Savana for providing them. The school nurse and secretary subsequently required her to strip to her underwear, pull out her bra and move it side to side, and open her legs to pull out her underwear.

Now, Savana's case against the school board is rising to the Supreme Court; it will be presented on April 21st.

The other part of the story that I can't wrap my head around is that the school is continuing to fight her. As Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw of United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco said, "It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights." Savana's case won in that court, which ruled that the school officials had violated her Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches, so the fact that it's now going to the Supreme Court means that the school appealed the jurisdiction to the higher court.

The school district says that because abuse of prescription and over-the-counter medications is on the rise among 12- and 13-year-olds, the search was “not excessively intrusive in light of Redding’s age and sex and the nature of her suspected infraction.” Maybe that gave them better cause to search her than just the fact that another tween girl accused her of possessing drugs (I mean, how credible is an accusation from one thirteen-year-old girl if it's directed at a friend with whom she had a falling-out?), but the abuse of these medications among tweens does not make the search any less intrusive. In fact, "in light of Redding's age and sex," I think the search was more intrusive - thirteen is when puberty's starting, when being strip-searched would probably be most scarring. The school nurse, one of the two women who conducted the search, said Savana "never appeared apprehensive or embarrassed," which is total bs. So the girl hid her terror and emotions because she was listening to what her school officials told her to do. These are the people that she's supposed to trust, that she's supposed to follow. The fact that she managed to keep her head down and hold back her tears doesn't mean that the search was any less traumatizing. She transferred to another school and developed stomach ulcers, for goodness' sake! These people should not be allowed to work around little kids!

The last court case involving student's Fourth Amendment rights in public schools was 1985's New Jersey v T.L.O. The article references the case, but I wish it had named it so that those interested could've easily looked it up (I just happened to know because I just wrote a scholarship involving it). That case ruled that school officials don't need probable cause to search students, but they do need reasonable in suspecting that said searches will indeed uncover incriminating evidence. Not only do I think that Savana's Fourth Amendment rights were violated - what reasonable teacher would suspect a 13-yr-old with no disciplinary record to have hidden ibuprofen beneath her clothing? - but she was denied her Fifth Amendment rights, too. The Fifth Amendment says "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." and in its execution there are two parts - substantive due process and procedural due process. Substantive due process basically deals with whether the word of law itself is fair, and procedural due process addresses whether a law's enforcement is executed fairly. The school's zero tolerance drug policy is fine, but clearly the procedural due process of its execution in Savana's case was nonexistent.

First of all, I want to point out that the headline, "Strip-Search of Girl Tests Limit of School Policy" probably draws in 500x more readers just because it has the words "strip-search" and "school" in the same sentence. Nice move, Adam Liptak. I do have to admit that the reporting of the story is slanted towards Savana, but in this situation, I think it would be near impossible to write an unbiased article as a human being with any ounce of compassion. By starting out with the sentence, "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," Adam Liptak forces the reader to put themselves in the shoes (or clothes) of the violated girl, an introduction that immediately calls for sympathy towards her. It's definitely an effective way to catch an audience, and in a delicate story like this, Liptak is probably safer writing an article biased towards Savana (after all, hasn't the poor girl been through enough trauma without unsympathetic press coverage?). However, graphically describing the strip search and the clothes Savana had to remove indicates a deliberate choice of Liptak's to prioritize the support for Savana above the straight, dry reporting of a sensitive subject. Savana and those on "her side" are quoted much more than the school board's side, but to Liptak's credit, the Superintendent of Schools Mark R. Tregaskes did not respond to Liptak's messages. At least he was given the opportunity to speak for himself.

Another important thing that Liptak brings up, which fills in some opposition a little more clearly, is that Supreme Court cases set precedents - major precedents. Its rulings have the strength of law. Professor Richard Arum at NYU is quoted, "Do we really want to encourage cases where students and parents are seeking monetary damages against educators in such school-specific matters where reasonable people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances?"

It is a good point - if Savana can get money now, other kids could sue for money from public schools for less traumatic incidents. Even if they wouldn't win, defense in court is expensive, an I'm pretty sure America's public schools can't afford that. But, as Arum said, this could potentially be an issue when "people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances". I'm pretty sure we can all agree that Savana's strip search wasn't.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/us/24savana.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all