MONITORING INMATES ... ER, STUDENTS

Short Of Being Asked To Undress, Kids In School Have Few Privacy
Protections.

Public schools are filled with eager, fresh-faced youngsters, and
prisons contain many rough-looking adults with uninviting
personalities. But put aside that difference and you find some
important similarities between the two places -- government-run
facilities where individuals are held for a specific number of years
without their consent, at the mercy of their custodians.

For years, the Supreme Court has been doing its best to further blur
the distinction by giving public-school officials the same powers as
the warden of San Quentin. So it was a mild surprise last week to
learn there are some abridgments of freedom and invasions of privacy
inflicted on children that the justices will not tolerate.

That's the good news for youngsters. The bad news is unless an
administrator makes you take off your clothes, you're probably out of
luck.

One day in the fall of 2003, a middle-school student in Safford,
Ariz., was caught with contraband ibuprofen, which she said she had
gotten from Savana Redding. The 13-year-old Savana was called to the
office, where she denied knowing anything about the pills and agreed
to a search of her belongings.

When it turned up nothing, an administrative assistant took her to
the nurse's office and told her to remove her jacket, socks and
shoes. Still no pills.

That would have been the perfect moment for a sudden burst of common
sense, inducing the school officials to admit defeat and let the girl
get back to algebra. But the needed epiphany did not come to the
adults. They ordered Savana to take off her shirt and pants -- a
step that also proved unavailing.

Were they done? No, they were not. In their relentless quest for
illicit Advil, the officials refused to let considerations of modesty
be an impediment. They insisted that Savana pull her bra and
underpants away from her body to prove she was not hiding pills
there. Again, they got nothing.

Last week, though, they got a rebuke from the Supreme Court. It has
given principals and teachers great latitude in imposing control on
children. But even justices who were indulgent with past government
intrusions gagged at the image of officials peeking into an
adolescent's most private areas.

Justices Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg don't agree on many
things. But they and six other justices (Clarence Thomas being the
exception) joined in a decision that rejected abusing public-school
students in the name of protecting them.

The Fourth Amendment, they noticed, says individuals shall not be
subject to "unreasonable searches and seizures," and this search was
flagrantly unreasonable. The mere possibility of finding pills in
underpants is not enough, wrote Justice David Souter, to "make the
quantum leap from outer clothes and backpacks to exposure of intimate
parts."

School administrators might be forgiven for not knowing that. After
all, the Supreme Court had previously allowed them to force students
to undergo drug testing as a condition of participating in any
extracurricular activity. Making students who have done nothing wrong
produce a urine sample under the monitoring of a teacher, it
insisted, was "not significant" as a breach of privacy.

The court had also permitted schools to search a kid's locker,
backpack and purse on even modest suspicion that some trivial school
rule had been violated.

Justice John Paul Stevens complained that under these decisions, "a
student detained by school officials for questioning, on reasonable
suspicion that she has violated a school rule, is entitled to no more
protection under the Fourth Amendment than a criminal suspect under
custodial arrest." The Constitution's privacy protection, he said,
has become "virtually meaningless in the school context."

Stevens did not exaggerate. Even in this case, the court was willing
to tolerate making a 13-year-old girl strip to her underwear. It was
the "exposure of intimate parts," not the exposure of everything
else, that caused the justices to bridle. But if a more dangerous
item had been sought or if there had been reason to think she was
actually hiding a pill in her bra, the majority indicated, the search
might have been perfectly acceptable.

So there's still a difference between the rights we afford students
and the rights we afford prison inmates. Just not a very big one.