THE SCHOOL CROTCH INSPECTOR

Fighting The Advil Menace, One Strip Search At A Time

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it's
perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of
bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people
should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group
includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who
in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not
concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

It also includes two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th
Circuit, who last fall ruled that the strip search did not violate
Savana's Fourth Amendment rights. The full court, which recently heard
oral arguments in the case, now has an opportunity to overturn that
decision and vote against a legal environment in which schoolchildren
are conditioned to believe government agents have the authority to
subject people to invasive, humiliating searches on the slightest pretext.

Safford Middle School has a "zero tolerance" policy that prohibits
possession of all drugs, including not just alcohol and illegal
intoxicants but prescription medications and over-the-counter
remedies, "except those for which permission to use in school has been
granted." In October 2003, acting on a tip, Vice Principal Kerry
Wilson found a few 400-milligram ibuprofen pills (each equivalent to
two over-the-counter tablets) and one nonprescription naproxen tablet
in the pockets of a student named Marissa, who claimed Savana was her
source.

Savana, an honors student with no history of disciplinary trouble or
drug problems, said she didn't know anything about the pills and
agreed to a search of her backpack, which turned up nothing
incriminating. Wilson nevertheless instructed a female secretary to
strip-search Savana under the school nurse's supervision, without even
bothering to contact the girl's mother.

The secretary had Savana take off all her clothing except her
underwear. Then she told her to "pull her bra out and to the side and
shake it, exposing her breasts," and "pull her underwear out at the
crotch and shake it, exposing her pelvic area."

Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between drug warriors and
child molesters.

"I was embarrassed and scared," Savana said in an affidavit, "but felt
I would be in more trouble if I did not do what they asked. I held my
head down so they could not see I was about to cry." She called it
"the most humiliating experience I have ever had." Later, she
recalled, the principal, Robert Beeman, said "he did not think the
strip search was a big deal because they did not find anything."

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that a public school official's search
of a student is constitutional if it is "justified at its inception"
and "reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified
the interference in the first place." This search was neither.

When Wilson ordered the search, the only evidence that Savana had
violated school policy was the uncorroborated accusation from Marissa,
who was in trouble herself and eager to shift the blame. Even Marissa
(who had pills in her pockets, not her underwear) did not claim that
Savana currently possessed any pills, let alone that she had hidden
them under her clothes.

Savana, who was closely supervised after Wilson approached her, did
not have an opportunity to stash contraband. As the American Civil
Liberties Union puts it, "There was no reason to suspect that a
thirteen-year-old honor-roll student with a clean disciplinary record
had adopted drug-smuggling practices associated with international
narcotrafficking, or to suppose that other middle-school students
would willingly consume ibuprofen that was stored in another student's
crotch."

The invasiveness of the search also has to be weighed against the evil
it was aimed at preventing. "Remember," the school district's lawyer
recently told ABC News by way of justification, "this was
prescription-strength ibuprofen." It's a good thing the school took
swift action, before anyone got unauthorized relief from menstrual
cramps.