STRIP-SEARCHES AT SCHOOLS GO TO SUPREME COURT

In an Arizona Case, Administrators Were Worried About Campus Safety,
While the Student Just Felt Humiliated.

When Savana Redding, now 19, talks of what happened to her in eighth
grade, it is clear that the painful memories linger.

She speaks of being embarrassed and fearful and of staying away from
school for two months. And she recalls the "whispers" and "stares"
from others in this small eastern Arizona mining town after she was
strip-searched in the nurse's office because a vice principal
suspected she might be hiding extra-strength ibuprofen in her underwear.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear her case. Its decision,
the first to address the issue of strip-searches in schools, will set
legal limits, if any, on the authority of school officials to search
for drugs or weapons on campus.

If limits on searches are imposed, the school district warns, its
ability to keep all drugs out of its schools would be reduced.

In this case, said school district lawyer Matthew Wright, the vice
principal was concerned because one student had gotten seriously ill
from taking unidentified pills.

"That was the driving force for him. If nothing had been done, and
this happened to another kid, parents would have been outraged," Wright said.

In California and six other states, strip-searches of students are
not permitted.

Only once in the past has the high court ruled on a school-search
case, and it sounds quaint now. It arose in 1980 when a New Jersey
girl was caught smoking in the bathroom, and the principal searched
her purse for cigarettes.

The justices upheld that search because the principal had a specific
reason for looking in her purse. However, they did not say how far
officials could go -- and how much of a student's privacy could be
sacrificed -- to maintain safety at school.

That's the issue in Safford Unified School District vs. Redding.

Savana was an honors student, shy and "nerdy" when the she began
eighth grade at Safford Middle School, she says.

She first learned she was in trouble when Vice Principal Kerry Wilson
entered math class one morning and told her to come with him to the office.

He was in search of white pills.

Wilson knew that a boy had gotten sick from pills he obtained at
school. And that morning, another eighth-grader, Marissa Glines, was
found with what turned out to be several 400-milligram ibuprofen
pills tucked into a folded school planner. A few days before, Savana
had lent Marissa the folder. The vice principal also found a small
knife, a cigarette and a lighter in it.

When asked where she got the pills, Marissa named Savana Redding.

These "could only be obtained with a prescription," Wilson reported.

Commonly used for headaches or to relieve pain from menstrual cramps,
ibuprofen is marketed under brand names including Advil and Motrin
with recommend doses of 200 and 400 milligrams.

"District policy J-3050 strictly prohibits the nonmedical use or
possession of any drug on campus," Wilson explained later in a sworn statement.

Savana said she knew nothing of the pills in the folder.

"He asked if he could search my backpack. I said, 'Sure,' " she
recalled. When nothing was found, Wilson sent Savana to the nurse's
office, where the nurse and an office assistant were told to "search
her clothes" for the missing pills.

Savana said she kept her head down, embarrassed and afraid she would
cry. After removing her pink T-shirt and black stretch pants, she was
told to pull her underwear to the side and to shake so any pills
there could be dislodged.

It was "the most humiliating experience" of her young life, she said.

"We did not find any pills during our search of Savana," Wilson reported.

When her mother arrived at the school to pick her up, another student
called out to her: "What are you going to do about them
strip-searching Savana?"

Upset and angry, April Redding said she marched to the principal's
office, then to the superintendent's office nearby. Both denied at
first knowing that a student had been strip-searched.

"It was wrong. I didn't think anything like that could happen to my
daughter at school," she said, wiping a tear.

She later met with the principal but left, unsatisfied: "He said you
should be happy we didn't find anything."

Contacted at the school recently, Wilson declined to discuss the
case, as did other school officials.

When no one apologized, April Redding sued the school district for
damages. Her lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union say the
strip-search went far beyond the bounds of reasonableness, especially
when there was no imminent danger.

A strip-search can be deeply embarrassing and leave an emotional
scar, they add.

So far, however, judges have been almost evenly divided over whether
Savana's rights were violated.

A federal magistrate in Tucson held that the search was reasonable
because the vice principal was relying on the tip from another
student. In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

Last year, however, the full 9th Circuit Court took up the case and
ruled 6 to 5 for the Reddings.

Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw said the vice principal's action defied
common sense as well the Constitution.

"A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his
charge, does not subject a 13-year-old girl to a traumatic search to
'protect' her from the danger of Advil," she wrote.

"A school is not a prison. The students are not inmates," she added,
noting that juvenile prisoners are given more rights than were given Savana.

Two of the dissenters agreed the search was unreasonable, but they
said the officials should be shielded from suits because the law has
been unclear.

The three other dissenters, including Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, said
the search was reasonable based on what Wilson knew at the time.

Last fall, the school district appealed to the Supreme Court, saying
it "finds itself on the front lines of the decades-long war against
drug abuse among students." The justices voted in January to hear the
case, a good sign for the school district.

In recent years, national school officials say they have heard of
only a few instances of strip-searches at schools.

After the search, Savana refused to return to the middle school. She
did not want to be in the presence of the nurse or the office
assistant who she said humiliated her.

She went to an alternative high school in Safford but dropped out
before graduating. She is taking psychology classes at nearby Eastern
Arizona College.

She and her mother plan to travel to Washington to hear her case
argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. For Savana, it will be
her first trip on an airplane.