RANDOM PESTERING: COURT WRONG TO UPHOLD DRUG TESTS IN SCHOOLS

Ask any teacher to identify the most effective ways to keep youngsters away
from drugs. The teacher will reply that it's important to find ways to get
students involved in extracurricular activities that keep kids active and
engaged - and less vulnerable to the temptation to use drugs.

It's Common Sense Education 101, a course apparently never taken by U.S.
Supreme Court justices. Last Thursday, a five-member majority gave public
school officials broad authority to require students to pass drug tests
before participating in extracurricular activities, ranging from marching
bands to debate clubs.

The case involved Lindsay Earls, a former high school student from
Tecumseh, Okla., who challenged the local school board's requirement that
all students seeking to participate in school activities submit to random
drug tests.

Earls, an honors student with a sterling reputation, wanted to march in the
school band and sing in the school choir, but she refused to submit to drug
tests that she regarded as degrading and insulting.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said the Tecumseh program
was reasonable in light of the "nationwide epidemic of drug use." Yet
Thomas seemed curiously unfazed that Tecumseh schools have no serious drug
problems. "It would make little sense to require a school district to wait
for a substantial portion of its students begin to use drugs before it was
allowed to institute a drug-testing program," he stated.

The decision expands on a 1995 ruling in which the high court upheld a
policy adopted by a school board in Vernonia, Ore. That program required
drug tests of all student athletes - decision that had some merit, given
the possibility that illegal drug use by athletes might contribute to
sports-related injuries, even deaths.

But the Tecumseh policy, adopted three years later, took drug testing to a
new level, requiring it as a condition of participation in all of the
district's extracurricular activities, including sports, bands, academic
teams, chorus, cheerleading - even the Future Homemakers of America.

Such testing is an inappropriate and invasive overreaction to the threat of
drugs in schools. The high court failed to recognize that students also
have a constitutional right to privacy and protection from unreasonable
searches and seizures.

Suspicionless drug testing unfairly casts a net over the larger student
population, snagging youngsters who are using drugs and punishing them. It
also has the unhappy effect of discouraging those who may have merely
experimented with drugs from participating in the very activities that
might discourage them from using drugs in the future.

Regardless of the Supreme Court's ruling, school districts across the
nation should think long and hard before requiring students to take random
drug tests. Future graduates should look back on high school memories of
fiercely contested football games and cafeteria food fights, not of filling
up plastic containers for a glum-faced school nurse.