IT'S SCHOOL, NOT PRISON

Several U.S. Supreme Court justices seem poised--indeed, eager--to allow
widely expanded drug testing in schools. Think of what that might mean in
Los Angeles, where too few schools have enough textbooks, credentialed
teachers or even toilet paper. Would administrators be expected to spend
classroom time and buckets of money making tens of thousands of students
urinate into plastic cups? That strikes us as unconstitutionally invasive,
not particularly helpful in rooting out drug use and certain to sour
whatever love of learning is left in these difficult educational times.

In 1995, the court upheld an Oregon school board's policy that all athletes
submit to drug testing as a condition of participation in team sports. In
1998, Tecumseh High School in Oklahoma went much further, insisting that
students in any after-school program be subject to routine and random
tests. You want to sign up for the choir? Future Farmers of America? The
chess club? Here's a cup, get in line. Now it's up to the Supreme Court to
decide whether this is constitutional. Last month, when they heard the
challenge to Oklahoma's testing policy, brought by a choir member, now
graduated, several justices made clear that their sympathies were with the
Tecumseh school. If parents do not like the policy, Justice Antonin Scalia
snapped, they can ask the school board to change it. Or send their child to
a "druggie school," offered Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. A ruling is
expected by summer.

Of course, it's hard enough for a student to grasp algebra or a
Shakespearean sonnet without being distracted by mumbling pot heads or
babbling coke addicts. But when school officials have reasonable suspicion
that a student is using illegal drugs or has brought them onto campus, they
already can--and should--identify that individual and, if a search or test
confirms drug use, expel him or her. Schools already have the authority to
search lockers and backpacks, and vigilant administrators in Los Angeles
and elsewhere do that.

But what would happen if schools received a green light for drug testing in
the absence of specific suspicions, as seems possible based on the
justices' sharp retorts in the case? The kids doing drugs are probably too
messed up to make the track team or be interested in the debate club in the
first place. So under the Tecumseh policy, schools would focus their
testing on the kids least likely to be stoners and make them feel like
criminals in the process. Indeed, in the first year the policy was in place
only three students turned up with positive drug tests. Probably lots of
other kids were dissuaded from joining school clubs.

In Northern California's Modoc County, the school board was poised to go
even further, requiring annual drug tests of all high school students. But
the board dropped the plan last week amid protests from parents and
students--one of whom asked the provocative question: Why not test the
whole town?

There's a serious constitutional issue at stake here. The 4th Amendment's
ban on unreasonable searches would seem to require school officials to have
reasonable suspicion that a student is using drugs before subjecting him or
her to a urine test.

To endorse Tecumseh's invasive and humiliating screening policy is to
declare that children, as a group, leave their constitutional rights at the
schoolhouse door. Only prisoners, as a group, have lesser constitutional
protections by law. And to reach that condition people have to be convicted
of a crime first. Surely we don't think of our children as prison inmates.

Tecumseh's policy is not only extremely troubling on constitutional
grounds, it's also costly, distracting and not much help in cutting drug
use on campus. If only the Supreme Court could see that.