SAFETY VS. FREEDOM

The recent Supreme Court decision on searching school backpacks puts
a large number of students at risk

The Supreme Court of Canada decision that school searches of
backpacks is illegal will surely come as a surprise to secondary
school principals and vice-principals who thought that they, and not
the Supreme Court, were in charge and responsible for controlling
what adolescent children brought into the school building in their backpacks.

Those same principals and vice-principals also had thought that since
they were, under the School Act, responsible "in loco parentis" for
the well-being and safety of all children under their care during
school hours that this responsibility might be seen to outweigh any
considerations of privacy on behalf of the few children who, for
whatever reason, bring guns, knives, drugs and other non educational
paraphernalia into the school.

And that, like it or not, happens all the time. Not so, says the
Supreme Court in its most recent decision:

"As with briefcases, purses and suitcases, backpacks are the
repository of much that is personal . . . . Teenagers may have little
expectation of privacy from the searching eyes and fingers of their
parents, but they expect the contents of their backpacks not to be
open to the random and speculative scrutiny of the police. This
expectation is a reasonable one that society should support."

The court went on to explain to long-suffering high school
administrators that, "When rights and interests as fundamental as
personal privacy and autonomy are at stake, the constitutional role
of the court suggests that the creation of a new and more intrusive
power of search and seizure should be left to Parliament to set up
and justify under a proper statutory framework."

This is very bad news for those charged with protecting the freedoms
and rights of kids who don't bring bad stuff to school and very good
news for those few kids who do.

True, the court decision arises out of a single event where an
Ontario Catholic school was locked down for a couple of hours while
police and a trained dog searched for, and subsequently found a
backpack with bags of marijuana and magic mushrooms in a gymnasium.

There may be more to the story, but on the face of it the decision
creates and enormous problem for those trying to control schools.

It is not uncommon for school administrators to receive information
from kids who don't see the school as a drugstore or a weapons mall,
and to act "in loco parentis" upon that information in an attempt to
convey the message that they are serious about "no drugs or weapons
in our school" and that the school is a safe place for our children.

Again, not so.

"While the [dog] search may have been seen by the police as an
efficient use of their resources, and by the principal of the school
as an efficient way to advance a zero-tolerance policy, these
objectives were achieved at the expense of the privacy interest (and
constitutional rights) of every student in the school."

That will also come as a bit of a puzzlement to school administrators
and, one would hope, to many parents who might have thought that
protecting the rights of all children to a safe and drug-free
education was exactly what the principal in this case was doing.

Apparently that action can now only be taken by an act of Parliament
if reports of the Supreme Court's decision have been accurately reported.

I know, I know, the law is there to protect everybody's right against
unlawful search and seizure, but when you have a building with a few
adults trying to control the actions of maybe a thousand adolescent
children, many of whose judgment about what's right and what's wrong
is still in the formative stage -- well, things can get pretty
challenging as it is.

Knowing that among those children are even one or two who have some
potential to harm others, and every large school, public or private,
has those one or two, keeps school administrators on guard.

If this otherwise reliable student who is troubled by drugs or
weapons in the school comes to the principal and tells the principal
that Johnny has dope or a gun in his backpack -- what is the
principal's next logical step short of informing the police, who then
attempt, on the basis of this flimsy information and in the light of
the Supreme Court's opinion, try to obtain a search warrant that day?

No. The principal should call Johnny into the office with his
backpack and the combination to his locker, explains the situation
and, with or without Johnny's permission, take a good long look
through both. The harm done to Johnny's freedoms surely is outweighed
by the drug availability in the school or even the potential for a
repetition of the kind of unthinkable school incidents we read about
every other week.

We need the law and we need the Supreme Court but we also need
day-to-day common sense.

While the learned judges were no doubt correct within the
complexities of law, Robert Green Ingersoll put it better:

"It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education
than to have education without common sense."