TECUMSEH TUBA TRAGEDY

Drug Testing

THE Tecumseh Oklahoma school district didn't have a drug problem, so it had
trouble explaining why it required all children in competitive
extracurricular activities to get drug tests.

Thinking creatively, the district cited the dangers of band members on
drugs performing "extremely precise routines with heavy equipment and
instruments in close proximity to other students." It pointed out that the
Future Farmers of America are "required to individually control and
restrain animals as large as 1500 pounds." The Justice Department, always
ready with reasons to surrender rights to the drug war, chimed in that the
Future Homemakers of America had to work with "cutlery and other sharp
instruments."

Most people wouldn't be fooled by such arguments. But a majority of the
Supreme Court decided those were valid reasons to toss another Fourth
Amendment log on the pyre of the drug war. Dissenting, Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg uncharacteristically mocked the result, unconvinced by the
"nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock run amok, and
colliding tubas disturbing the peace and quiet of Tecumseh."

The Supreme Court said three decades ago that public schools students
didn't shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate, but the
court has been taking away liberties ever since. First, the court made it
easy for principals to search lockers. Then, in 1995, it approved mandatory
drug testing for high school athletes. That was one of a series of
decisions in which the court cut back on the Fourth Amendment right to be
free from unreasonable searches.

The student drug problem is a real one. Nationally, about 54 percent of
12th graders reported using illicit drugs in 2001, compared to 48 percent
in 1995. To Justice Clarence Thomas and the court majority, Tecumseh's
policy was a reasonable response.

In the 1995 student athlete case, the court decided that athletes have
little expectation of privacy, partly because they undress and shower in
locker rooms. Lindsay Earls, a member of the show choir, marching band,
Academic Team and National Honor Society, argued that she had a greater
expectation of privacy than athletes. But Justice Thomas disagreed, noting
that club activities often require off-campus travel and "communal undress."

Requiring a student to provide a urine sample, while a teacher stands
outside the bathroom stall listening for sounds of urination, is a
"negligible" intrusion into student privacy, he said. Justice Ginsburg said
the program was "perverse" because it tested the students least likely to
use drugs.

Most school districts have had the good sense to avoid mandatory drug
testing. A regimen of forced drug testing tells students that adults don't
trust them. It turns teachers into bathroom monitors at a time when parents
and school boards are demanding better performance in the classroom. School
boards should just say no.