A THREAT TO STUDENT PRIVACY

The Orleans Parish School Board in Louisiana has ill-advisedly joined other
educational institutions in considering broad student testing for drug abuse.

The board is reviewing a program that would require random testing of all
students involved in athletics and extracurricular activities, with
voluntary testing for the rest of the student body.

The program was recommended to the board by the Orleans Parish District
Attorney's office.

Some board members have expressed concern over potential legal issues, as
well they should.

Testing on this scale clearly endangers students' Fourth Amendment rights,
which guard against searches without probable cause.

The District Attorney's office is also encouraging the use of hair tests,
as opposed to more conventional urine sampling.

But the reliability of hair tests has yet to be firmly established, and
until it is, such tests should not be used. A false positive reading could
have drastic effects on a child's life.

The public schools seem to have been inspired partly by the schoolwide drug
testing in some private schools.

But a key factor is the Supreme Court's 1995 decision upholding testing of
student athletes.

Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion argued that athletes were a
distinct community because they had joined their teams on a voluntary basis
and already had a "reduced expectation for privacy" in the locker-room
atmosphere. He further argued that because school administrators served in
loco parentis, students could not expect to enjoy the same privacy rights
as adults.

In a soundly reasoned dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued that even
random tests for athletes could be considered "blanket searches of mostly
innocent students." She said that "suspicion based testing," invoking
probable cause, would more effectively guard privacy rights.

Nevertheless, the Scalia argument prevailed, raising fears among civil
libertarians that it would someday open the door to schoolwide testing in
public schools.

In a subsequent case, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an
Indiana high school could require students involved in extracurricular
activities to submit to random drug testing

As for the tests themselves, there is general agreement that hair retains
evidence of drug use for a longer period than urine.

But scientists have raised questions, including whether the tests have a
racial bias. False positives occur more frequently among minorities than
among whites.

In many ways, students form a captive and vulnerable population.

Justice O'Connor called the random testing of athletes a "mass,
suspicionless search regime." Tests that applied to every student from the
French club to the debate team would be an even broader threat to personal
privacy.

The Orleans board would be better advised to emulate school districts in
Florida, New Jersey and Washington, which have chosen instead to build
comprehensive drug education programs and trust between school
administrators and students.