COURT EXPANDS SCHOOLS' RIGHT TO TEST STUDENTS FOR DRUG USE

The nation's high schools have a green light to administer random drug
tests to cheerleaders, chess club members and any student involved in
competitive after-school activities -- even if authorities have no cause to
believe those students are using drugs, or that a drug problem exists in
their school -- the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The ruling was decried by civil libertarians as a gross invasion of
privacy. But a student's right to privacy, the court ruled in a 5-4 vote,
is outweighed by a school's interest in combating drug use through random
testing.

Given that as many as half of America's estimated 14 million high school
students participate in competitive extracurricular activities, the ruling
constitutes a significant expansion of school administrators' authority to
test students without suspicion of wrongdoing. The court had previously
upheld random testing only for student athletes.

It remains to be seen how many school districts will take advantage of the
court's ruling, given the added expense -- at least $30 per student -- and
volatile nature of random drug-testing programs on school campuses.
Currently, some schools in California screen athletes for drugs, but it was
unclear Thursday if any test other students.

Just knowing the tests exist, the court indicated in its majority opinion,
is a strong deterrent against students using drugs.

Yvonne Pingue, 17, just graduated from Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill,
where she worked on the school newspaper and participated on the track
team. She agreed that tests are a deterrent, and supported the ruling.

"Everyone does drugs, even the geeks," Yvonne said. "It's not just the
athletes. If you can detect more people, more people won't do it."

School, the court said, is different from the community in general.

"Schoolchildren are routinely required to submit to physical examinations
and vaccinations against disease," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the
majority. "Securing order in the school environment sometimes requires that
students be subjected to greater controls than those appropriate for adults."

The court stopped short of allowing random tests for all students, but
several justices have indicated their interest in taking up that issue at
some point.

Thomas was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices
Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer.

The case landed in the Supreme Court after student Lindsay Earls sued over
her rural Oklahoma high school's drug-testing policy, which required
students to pass a drug test as a condition of participating in competitive
extracurricular activities. Students also had to agree to submit to random
testing later on.

Called 'Capricious'

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a dissent, characterized the Tecumseh,
Okla., policy as "capricious, even perverse."

"Many children, like many adults, engage in dangerous activities on their
own time; that the children are enrolled in school scarcely allows
government to monitor all such activities," Ginsburg wrote.

The other dissenters were Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens
and David H. Souter.

Critics of the ruling warned it could result in increased drug use on
campuses by discouraging students from participating in extracurricular
activities.

"The best thing you can do to prevent drug use is get kids involved in
extracurricular activities, and the last thing you want to do is set up
barriers," said Graham Boyd, the lawyer who argued the students' case
before the Supreme Court.

Boyd, director of the drug-policy litigation project with the American
Civil Liberties Union, said a number of students at the Tecumseh school
dropped out of debate team and marching band after the policy was
instituted because they were shy about giving a urine sample with a teacher
waiting outside the stall.

But a Pennsylvania mother whose 18-year-old daughter died in 1998 from a
heroin overdose lauded the court's decision.

"A lot of parents don't recognize the signs till addiction has taken hold,"
said Sharon Smith, who has become an advocate of campus drug testing. "This
is a tool for prevention."

Thursday's decision overturned a ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals in Denver, which found in 2001 that the Tecumseh testing program
was unreasonable because school officials had not shown there was a
specific problem for which drug testing was a solution.

The ruling is a follow-up to a 1995 case in which the Supreme Court allowed
random urine tests of student athletes.

Prohibitive Costs

There is no comprehensive data on the extent to which schools have adopted
random drug-testing programs following the 1995 ruling. But according to
Boyd of the ACLU, about 5 percent of schools nationwide have required drug
tests for student athletes, while about 2 percent have tested students in
other extracurricular activities.

It is unclear how much Thursday's ruling will change those percentages.

"It's not going to change much here," said John Schilling, assistant
principal of activities at San Jose's Gunderson High School, adding that
about 60 to 70 percent of Gunderson students participate in extracurricular
activities.

Schilling said that Gunderson doesn't currently test its athletes because
of the expense, and he sees the expense as a deterrent to testing students
in other extracurricular activities as well.

"Our athletic teams are forced to fundraise just to get uniforms,"
Schilling said. "The chess club and the choir are going to face the same
funding issues as well."

School administrators also worry whether random drug testing would alienate
students.

"You have to connect before you can correct," said Gary Stebbins, a
principal at San Jose's Rogers Middle School.