FOR STUDENTS, SOME RIGHTS ARE CHECKED AT THE DOOR

Four students were arrested at Sussex Central High School this week
after police officers, with the school's cooperation, put the school
day on pause to sweep the campus for illegal drugs. They found some,
police said -- thus the charges, and long suspensions.

It's not what parents think they're sending their children off to in
the morning, a drug-raid shakedown. "My kids are starting to feel that
they are in a jail," one parent wrote on the Delaware Wave's Web site,
delawarewave.com, which reported the raid as it happened Friday
morning. "I feel there are good intentions in the actions of the
administration but they need to pick their battles."

Perhaps they are, because unannounced drug raids are only the
beginning of what administrators are legally permitted to do in the
name of uncovering students' misdeeds. There are some limits to the
times and places police and administrators can inspect students, their
belongings and their speech, but this lockdown was on the correct side
of those limits. If parents feel strongly enough about it, they should
lobby elected officials to turn the tide.

Could Indian River have told students to submit urine samples for drug
tests? Yes, the Supreme Court said in 1995, if the testing was linked
to volunteering for an activity like sports or a chess club. About 5
percent of schools around the country do so.

If students had published articles in the student newspaper, could
administrators have censored the paper or halted its publication? Yes,
indeed. A 1987 Supreme Court decision about newspaper censorship in
St. Louis held that school papers were educational tools, not true
avenues of speech, and that they could be controlled by educators. In
2006, the Supreme Court declined to overturn a ruling that applied the
same principle to college newspapers, too.

The legal history of privacy rights of high schoolers is not one that
should encourage high school students to store their stash in their
lockers. Neither, regrettably, should they expect to exercise their
free-speech rights in student newspapers. Students' privacy rights are
worth something, but decades of lawmaking and court rulings have
shaved that worth down to a nub. Building it back up, if that's what
students and their parents want, will take hard work.