SHAKING DOWN THE SCHOOLS

For the sake of argument, let's imagine that the area around Lake
Morton in central Lakeland became infested with drugs and gun-toting
murderers. The police could set up roadblocks on Mississippi Avenue
and South Boulevard and other roads leading in and out of the lake
neighborhood. It could systematically stop every car and search
everyone for drugs and weapons. Even the swans.

The strategy would prove effective quickly, cleaning up the place of
illegal weapons and scaring off the drug dealers. But it would be
illegal, and it would incense the same residents who had clamored for
a more secure neighborhood.

Not keen on neighborhood shakedowns, Americans don't like random
intrusions in their private lives, even in the name of security. We're
not a banana republic, or even the French Republic, where such
intrusions can be routine, and where you're presumed guilty until
proven innocent.

Yet we're heading that way. Using the drug war for justification, the
U.S. Supreme Court has been whittling away at such protections as the
Fourth Amendment's against unreasonable searches. Employers routinely
drug-test their employees whether the job depends on a reefer-free
cerebrum (like driving a school bus or controlling air traffic) or
not. Schools search lockers at will. Government dogs sniff air
passengers' luggage without their consent. Five years ago the court
opened the way for schools to drug-test athletes, randomly or
systematically.

It wasn't intentional, but the Supreme Court has opened the door to
abuses.

Some schools are now interpreting the legality to drug-test athletes
as justification to drug-test all students. In Texas, a state that
tends to read laws in a Judge Roy Bean sort of way, two school
districts are requiring mandatory drug-testing of every high school
junior and senior -- the equivalent of setting up roadblocks around a
neighborhood and searching everyone coming in and out, regardless of
probable cause.

Only one parent has objected. Larry Tannahill, a fourth-generation
resident of the Texas Panhandle community, a farmer and father of two
boys, is taking the Lockney school district to court. He'll probably
win: No court in the nation has condoned mandatory drug testing of all
students, and the Supreme Court last year struck down an Indiana law
that required students suspended for drug use to take a urine test
before being allowed back in school.

What is remarkable in Texas is how enthusiastically the policies have
been accepted in the two school districts. Tannahill is suffering the
blistering ostracism that is every small town's gift to dissenters.
He's lost his job. He's received a death threat. People wish he'd just
leave. They're scared of drugs. They have reason to be.

The Texas Panhandle's docility toward the school districts' drug
policies, and the viciousness shown Tannahill, indicate a deep gulf
between public sentiment and the law. The gulf won't vanish with a
judge's decision to restore constitutional order. The public is
becoming infatuated with iron-fisted rules as substitutes for more
sensible, if sometimes more costly, approaches.

Shakedowns don't belong in schools. Schools can police their halls far
better than the police can police a city street. Especially in smaller
schools, students are -- or should be -- under an adult's supervision
at all times. Teachers know their students, coaches know their
athletes. They suspect drug use? Let them open their eyes and ears,
build a case and target their suspicions narrowly. Let them make
better use of the "school resource officer" (a hallway cop). Casting a
wide net to catch a few offenders makes the school's job easier. But
laziness is no excuse for skirting the rigors of a fairer approach.

As Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her dissent in
the athletes' case five years ago, "intrusive, blanket searches of
school children, most of whom are innocent, for evidence of serious
wrongdoing are not part of any traditional school function of which I
am aware. Indeed, many schools, like parents, prefer to trust their
children unless given reason to do otherwise."

Trusting his son Brady, Tannahill is doing nothing less than standing
by one of the principles his neighbors take for granted: He'd like
Brady to be presumed innocent. It's not a lot to ask for.