JUSTICES PLAN RULING ON SCHOOL DRUG TESTS

Decision To Focus On Student Activities

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court agreed on Thursday to decide whether public
schools may require students to pass drug tests as a condition of
participating in extracurricular activities.

The decision, due before the term ends early next summer, should clarify
the court's 1995 ruling that upheld drug testing for student athletes but
left school districts uncertain about whether they could apply drug testing
programs to other groups of students, or perhaps even to all students, as a
way to deter drug use.

The continuing legal uncertainty has limited the adoption of drug testing
programs, which remain the exception rather than the rule in the country's
15,500 public school systems.

Lower courts have reached different conclusions on whether drug testing
programs, none of which require suspicion of individual wrongdoing, amount
to unreasonable searches in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The case the justices accepted on Thursday is an appeal by the school board
of a rural district in Tecumseh, Okla., which adopted a drug-testing
program in 1998 for middle school and high school students engaged in
athletics and in other activities.

These included most extracurricular activities, including the chorus, the
band, the cheerleading squad, and the academic team.

Under the policy, students were to be tested, by urinalysis, at the
beginning of the school year and then randomly throughout the year, with
names drawn at random every month.

Those who refused to be tested were to be barred from participating in
their activities at the regional, state or national level. Those who failed
the test could continue in their activity if they agreed to participate in
drug counseling and stopped using drugs.

Two families with children in the high school sued to have the program
declared unconstitutional because it went beyond the testing of athletes
that the Supreme Court had upheld.

The two original student plaintiffs have graduated, but Lacey Earls, the
younger sister of one plaintiff, now a high school sophomore, was permitted
to enter the case to prevent it from becoming moot.

The plaintiffs lost in federal district court in Oklahoma City but won a
2-1 decision last March from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in
Denver, that the Tecumseh program was unconstitutional.

The drug testing policy was instituted for the 1998-99 school year and was
voluntarily suspended when the suit was filed. Of 505 high school students
tested, only three -- all athletes -- showed evidence of drug use.

The appeals court majority said that Tecumseh had not demonstrated that
there was "an actual drug abuse problem among those subject to the policy"
and that therefore the balancing test the Supreme Court adopted when it
upheld the testing of student athletes in Vernonia, Ore., tipped against
the school district in Tecumseh.