SUPREME COURT TO HEAR SCHOOL STRIP-SEARCH CASE

The Justices Will Also Determine Whether a Child With a Disability
Must Try Public Education Before Being Reimbursed With Taxpayer Funds
for Private School Tuition.

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear two schools cases, one to
clarify the law on searching students for drugs and the other to
decide whether taxpayers must cover private school tuition for a
child with a disability before the student has tried a public school.

The drug case began when school officials in southern Arizona decided
to crack down on the use and abuse of prescription medications,
including ibuprofen.

The Constitution protects against "unreasonable searches" by the
government, and the court in 1985 extended this protection to
students. But school officials also were told by the court that they
could search students, their backpacks or their lockers whenever
there was reason to suspect they had drugs or had violated other school rules.

Now, the court will decide whether a strip search is reasonable.

Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco
upheld a student's right to sue her assistant principal for ordering
her to be taken to a nurse's office and examined in her underwear.
Officials in her middle school were alarmed about the abuse of
prescription drugs, including prescription-strength ibuprofen. One
student had fallen violently ill from ingesting these pills.

Savana Redding, 13, was identified by another girl -- wrongly, it
turned out -- as having brought the pills to school. The search in
the nurse's office turned up nothing. The girl described the strip
search as humiliating, and she and her parents sued the Safford
Unified School District and the assistant principal for violating her
constitutional rights.

In its 6-5 decision, the 9th Circuit judges said the assistant
principal should be held liable for "a grossly intrusive search of a
middle school girl to locate pills with the potency of two
over-the-counter Advil capsules." The judges said that this full-body
search was clearly unreasonable in light of the circumstances.

Before the case could go further, the school district appealed to the
Supreme Court. Its lawyers said the ruling, if allowed to stand,
would "create enormous confusion for school officials in trying to
determine when and how searches may now properly be conducted." They
also said that because judges do not understand the "shifting trends
in drug abuse," they should defer to the judgment of school officials.

A lawyer for Savana said students should not be deprived of their
rights. "It offends both common sense and the Constitution to
undertake such an excessive, traumatizing search based on nothing
more than an uncorroborated accusation of ibuprofen possession," said
Adam Wolf of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The court voted Friday to hear the case of Safford vs. Redding in April.

An Oregon case the justices agreed to take up will decide a dispute
over special education.

Federal law says schools must provide a "free appropriate public
education" to students with a disability. This can include paying
tuition at a private school, but it is unclear whether parents first
must try a public program before they can claim reimbursement for the
cost of a private school.

Last year, the 9th Circuit said the Forest Grove School District must
pay the $5,200 monthly cost of a private program for a child with
attention deficit disorder. The court will hear the appeal in April.