TEACHER BRINGS CONSTITUTION TO LIFE

In 40 years of traveling around the country, speaking at high schools and
middle schools on the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution, I
have found only a few teachers who can bring the words off the page and into
the lives of their students.

One of the most passionately knowledgeable of those teachers is Sherry
Hearn. Voted Teacher of the Year at Windsor Forest High School in Savannah,
Ga., she has taught social studies and constitutional law there for 27
years.

As at many schools in the nation, Windsor Forest students are occasionally
subject without warning to dragnet raids by the police, who herd the
students into the hallways and use dogs to sniff the students, their purses
and their book bags. Metal detectors are used to scan students' bodies. The
students are locked into the building for two to three hours while the
police perform the search.

Due process ignored

Contrary to the specific words of the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of
Rights, the searches are conducted without any particular information that
any student has used or is using drugs.

All of them are presumed guilty of possessing drugs or weapons unless a
police dog or metal detector exonerates them.

Sherry Hearn taught her students for years about how the Fourth amendment
came into being because of the privacy abuses suffered by American colonists
due to the sweeping searches and seizures performed by British troops.
During one of these police sweeps on her school, a student asked her why she
was so angry at the raid.

"Because I believe in the Constitution," she said.

A policeman overheard her, reported her to the principal and said she should
be watched during the next lockdown.

At the next dragnet search, the police also searched the teachers' cars in
the parking lot in violation of a school policy that teachers' cars could
not be searched without the consent of their owners. Hearn was not asked for
her consent.

A police dog found that morning half of a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette in
an ashtray in her car. It was still warm. Sherry Hearn had been in the
school the entire morning. That night, a caller on the county's Silent
Witness line said that the cigarette had been planted in the car. He did not
give his identity. The cigarette was never produced as evidence because, a
police officer said, it had "crumbled" during the search and no residue was
kept.

Guilty until proven innocent?

According to school policy, Hearn was told she had to take a drug test
within two hours of being informed that an illegal substance had been found
in her car.

She had no record at all of previous drug use, and the principal, Linda
Herman, later testified that the teacher had not exhibited on the day of the
search, or on any other day, the characteristic behavior that would have
given rise to a "reasonable suspicion" that the marijuana cigarette was
hers.

On that day, however, Hearn was given her Miranda warnings and was ordered
to take a urine test in two hours. She wanted to contact her lawyer before
taking the test, but he was unavailable that day. Not having legal advice,
she refused.

She also said, "How can I face my students after I've consistently told them
that these mass drug searches violate their constitutional rights?"

The next day, having spoken to her attorney, she underwent a urinalysis, and
it proved negative for marijuana or any other controlled substance. (The
active ingredients in marijuana can be found in the body of a casual user
for up to 30 days, and up to a year in the body of a chronic user.)

The price of freedom?

No criminal charges were ever filed against Sherry Hearn, but she was fired
in the spring of 1996 for not having taken the urine test within the two
hours set forth in the school's policy. She has had great difficulty getting
a teaching job since losing her job, and has lost her appeals to the Georgia
State Board of Education and in the lower federal courts.

Sherry Hearn's last chance to get back to teaching constitutional law to
students rests with the United States Supreme Court. As the Atlanta
Constitution has said about her case, "This is not about drugs. This is
about the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution."

Her attorneys, including a lawyer for the Rutherford Institute, are asking
the Supreme Court to decide whether "public school students and teachers
have the right to be free from suspicionless mass drug searches on campus"
and whether "Hearn should have been ordered to take a drug test based on
alleged contraband that was illegally seized."

It's up to the Supreme Court to tell Sherry Hearn's students - and other
young Americans throughout the land - whether she was right in advising
students "Never, ever give up your rights that people have paid for in blood
just because it's the easy thing to do."