STRIP SEARCH GROWS FROM ZERO TOLERANCE

The McMinnville incident raises questions about student rights, but the
Supreme Court has sided with schools responding to crime.

McMINNVILLE -- Two women police employees sporting rubber gloves ordered
the girls to shake out their bras and pull down their underwear in a locker
room at Duniway Middle School.

The women were searching for CDs and other items swiped in the latest of a
string of thefts.

Two girls asked to call their parents but were denied, and at least one
girl initially refused to strip, the girls say. Some said they submitted to
the search because they didn't think they had the right to say no.

"I didn't want to argue," Ashley Church, 12, said. "I didn't know my rights
- -- nobody told me."

The search 11 days ago involved about two dozen seventh- and eighthgrade
girls. It raised similar concerns among students, parents, educators and
police across Oregon.

What right do school officials or police have to search students? Can a
student under suspicion contact his or her parents? What's the difference
among asking a question, examining a locker and, finally, asking a girl to
drop her pants?

And, if wrongly accused, what recourse do students have?

Several cases involving school searches have come before courts nationwide
during the past decade as schools try new, stricter procedures to deal with
rising school crime.

The answer, handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, is that strip searches
in schools are legal.

The issue keeps hitting the courts, experts say, because although the
Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees everyone, children
included, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, those rights
are limited once a student enters a school.

At least six parents of the McMinnville girls have notified the district
that they intend to sue for violating the girls' rights.

"I can understand zero tolerance for drugs and guns and violent behavior,"
said Ashley's father, Chris Church, who does not intend to sue. "Here we're
talking petty theft. Where does that justify a strip search? What about
these girlst rights?"

The U.S. Supreme Court rulings on searches might come as a surprise to
many: In 1985 and again in 1995, the court gave school administrators
leeway -- more leeway than police -- to search everything from a
students' pockets to their Fruit of the Looms to their urine. The court
said that to protect children from being harmed or harming others,
students' rights to privacy must be limited.

However, school or police officials must have a good reason to search, and
the search must occur within specific boundaries.

In the landmark 1985 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a case called New Jersey
vs. T.L.O., the court ruled that schools may search students if there is a
"reasonable" suspicion that students broke the law or school policy.
Schools must be able to explain the reason behind the search.

Schools must weigh the evidence the intrusiveness of the search process,
the suspected crime, and the age and sex of the student to consider a
search reasonable.

Items Missing

In the McMinnville search Jan. 29, several girls returning to the girl's
locker room after gym class reported 10 items were missing. The thief got
away with money, makeup, jewelry, compact discs and a disc player.

Up to the day of the strip search, Duniway had 42 reported crimes this
year, 16 of them thefts. There had been several arrests, according to the
McMinnville police.

Operating on the belief that the thief who stole from the locker room was
probably someone in the class, the McMinnville policeman assigned to
Duniway summoned two women employees from the police station to search the
girls.

The women, who are not officers also sifted through the girls' backpacks
but found no stolen items. The CD player surfaced in an eighth-grade girls
bathroom later that day.

School officials, who were initially vague about the invasiveness of the
search, said it was "police-led" and violated school district policies.
McMinnville police at first denied there was a strip search but later
confirmed the girls' accounts.

The Oregon State Police launched an investigation Thursday of adults
involved in the search, as well as the thefts that precipitated it.

In school searches it makes a difference whether school officials or police
take the lead because police searches require more evidence. Police must
have probable cause, a stricter standard. A school administrator, for
instance, can use hearsay as reason to search a student, but police cannot
use hearsay alone.

However, authorities do not need to meet either standard if they simply ask
to search a student and the student consents, said John Burgess, an
attorney for the Multnomah Educational Service District.

Schoolwide searches, such as metal detector sweeps and drugsniffing dogs,
are legal because the intrusions are mild compared with the danger that
weapons and drugs pose. Locker searches are legal because lockers are
district property.

Generally, the federal courts have ruled that intrusive searches must be
specific, not random.

Terry McElligot, who teaches civics to eighth-graders in the Newberg School
District, called the McMinnville search unfortunate.

"What I teach my kids is that they have a right to appeal, due process and
you have a right to petition and protest," she said.

Since the 1985 Supreme Court ruling, several federal courts in states such
as Alabama, New York and Michigan have held schools blameless in strip
searches. Most of those cases involved drugs or weapons.

Regardless of what crime a student may have committed, neither federal nor
state law requires schools to contact a parent before searching. Districts
may adopt policies that outlaw strip searches altogether or stipulate that
parents must be called before a search.

"Students rights are clearly eroding," said Jacqueline Stefkovich, a law
school professor at Temple University. "The most intrusive search is a
cavity search. The next level is a strip search." Until the 1990s, strip
searches were rare, she said.

Seven states, including Washington, have laws against strip searches in
schools, she added.

The McMinnville search marks the second time that an Oregon school has
gained national attention for allegedly violating search and seizure laws.
In 1991, a 12-year-old Vernonia student refused to take a urine drug test
that the district had required for athletes.

The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995. The court ruled that the
random drug test did not violate students' privacy rights. The court said
that the test was justified because "this evil (drugs) is being visited not
just upon individuals at large, but upon children for whom it has
undertaken a special responsibility."

Safety Concerns

Rising youth violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s spilled over into
schools, prompting a flurry of tough security policies in Oregon and across
the country.

In the 1995-96 school year, schools in 29 states and the District of
Columbia expelled more than 6,000 students for carrying guns to school,
federal statistics show. Oregon counted 2,195 expulsions, 428 for toting
weapons, 143 of them guns. Fifteen districts, including Portland didn't
report. Other expulsions im eluded 791 for behavior and 790 for alcohol and
tobacco.

"School officials have felt increased pressure to take whatever steps
necessary to make their campuses safe, free of weapons, free of drugs and
free of fear," said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National
School Safety Center in Thousand Oaks,
Calif.

At Marshall High School in Southeast Portland a teacher on hall duty greets
anyone who walks through the front door. That practice began in 1995 after
a 19-year-old intruder shot and wounded a student in the cafeteria.

All Portland schools now require visitors to sign in at the front office
and wear name tags, and most doors in the schools are kept locked. These
policies emerged in 1992 after a 12-year-old student was abducted from the
halls of Kellogg Middle School in Southeast Portland and raped in a nearby
motel.

Most school districts in Oregon now have a police presence, either through
contract or informal agreements with local police departments.

Districts across the country have tightened campus security and adopted
zero-tolerance policies that mandate expulsion of any student caught with
weapons or drugs. Schools also have won more authority in some states to
expel unruly kids. In a national poll last March nine of 10 principals said
such policies are essential for keeping schools safe.

Some administrators, emboldened by their broader authority, are extending
their reach to discipline students for off-campus offenses such as drug
use, fistfights and sexual harassment.

The public clearly wants stronger discipline, said Kathy Christie,
spokeswoman for the information clearinghouse run by the Education
Commission of the States in Denver. But tighter security has led to
excesses, ranging from improper searches to unreasonable expulsions.
"Everything is a balance," Christie said. "When things get out of whack,
you tend to get a big public blow-up."

Clear Policies

Oregon administrators say balancing school order and student rights
requires explicit policies that are clearly explained to students and
parents. It also demands good judgment.

The small Central Linn School District south of Albany twice has conducted
random drug searches of students involved in sports this year. It has
warned teen-agers it may bring drug-sniffing dogs to their lockers. It
expelled a student caught with a gun in November. So far, these actions
have not drawn a single complaint, says John H. Dallum, superintendent.

"It is because we started with a public discussion ... centered on making
our building a safe place to be," Dallum said.

The Salem-Keizer School District trains administrators how to conduct
searches, call in police only when they have probable cause and publish
their search policies in student handbooks. "This helps eliminate all the
miscommunication and mistrust," said Harold BurkeSivers, security
coordinator.

McMinnville residents say better communication among all involved adults
could have made the strip search, which most districts bar, less divisive
and could have kept the sleazy talk shows from calling.

"If we take a radical view where we get to treating these kids like they're
delinquents, we're going to lose all communication with our kids," said
Jeff Ingebrand, whose sixth-grade daughter attends Duniway. "I guess we
need to teach them what their rights and responsibilities are so they'll
know when authority crosses the line."

Question of Judgment

Even with good policies, however administrators invite problems by using
poor judgment.

Administrative judgment repeatedly has been challenged in recent years
about extreme decisions based on zero-tolerance policies. Last spring,
Carol McMakin brought a lawyer to confront administrators after her son,
Adam, 13, was expelled from Parkrose Middle School for sipping Scope
mouthwash, which contains alcohol. Officials settled on a short suspension.

Similar incidents have occurred in the past year across the country: An
8-year-old second-grader was suspended in Alexandria, La., for bringing her
grandfather's 1-inch knife, used to clean his fingernails, to show and
tell. A 13-year-old girl caught with Midol in Fairborn, Ohio, was suspended
for nine days; the girl that gave her the Midol was suspended 14 days
because distributing drugs is more serious than possession.

Most administrators, though, are cautious about enforcing safety rules.
Some schools call parents before they conduct a search. Most confine their
searches to individuals, with the exception of schoolwide locker searches.
Most make sure at least two adults are present when a student is searched.

How far a district goes with using metal detectors, surveillance cameras
and student searches, however depends on community will, says Ronald
Stephens of the National School Safety Center. A public uproar, he said,
"serves as a reality check for the community and how far it wants to go."

McMinnville schools got their reality check 11 days ago.

Chastity Pratt covers education for The Oregonian's MetroSouthwest news
bureau. She can be reached by telephone at 294-5926, by fax at 968-6061 or
by mail at 15495 S. W. Sequoia Parkway, Portland, Ore. 97224