SAVANNAH TEACHER'S SUIT APPEALED TO SUPREME COURT

The case of Sherry Hearn, the honored Savannah public school teacher
who was fired in 1996 for refusing to take a drug test after police
said they found a piece of a marijuana cigarette in her car, has been
submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Attorneys for the Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville,Va.-based
civil rights foundation, filed a petition this week asking the high
court to review her suit against the Chatham County Board of
Education. The suit had been dismissed by federal courts at the
district and appellate levels.

Rutherford Institute lawyer John Whitehead called the case a highly
important one because Hearn was a teacher of the U.S. Constitution who
objected to the mandated drug test on constitutional grounds. In
addition, the marijuana was found during a schoolwide "lockdown"
search for illegal drugs, a practice Hearn repeatedly had criticized
as being unconstitutional.

"Here's someone who really stood up for what they believe in,"
Whitehead said of Hearn.

Termination was the cost of that stand for Hearn, who had taught in
Chatham County schools for 27 years and was named that school system's
Teacher of the Year in 1994.

Whitehead said Hearn's punishment raises a legal question that the
nation's highest court should decide --- whether people's
constitutional rights are being lost in the process of trying to
operate drug-free schools, he said. "Have we gone too far?" he asked.

In a 2-1 vote in October, the 11th Circuit federal appellate court
dismissed Hearn's suit. Writing the majority opinion, Senior Circuit
Judge James C. Hill said Hearn's constitutional rights were not
violated. He added that Hearn's contract with the school board, which
states that employees must give their permission before their property
is searched, did not override the authority of police to search the
car.

However, Whitehead said he was encouraged by the strong wording of the
dissenting member of the appellate panel, District Judge Wilkie D.
Ferguson. He wrote that the school board's firing of Hearn could have
"chilling ramifications."

"Expectations of privacy guaranteed by the (school board's) policy
were ignored and the penalty imposed was the professional equivalent
of the death penalty," Ferguson wrote.