COURT WIDENS RULES FOR DRUG TESTING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the widespread use of
random drug testing of public school students in a significant expansion of
an earlier ruling that endorsed drug testing for student athletes.

The 5-4 decision upheld a program in a rural Oklahoma district that
required students engaged in "competitive" extracurricular activities, a
category that includes the future homemakers' club, the cheerleading squad
and the choir, to submit to random drug testing.

In emphasizing the "custodial responsibilities" of a public school system
toward its students, rather than the details of how the program was
organized, the majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to
encompass random drug testing of an entire student population.

But one member of the majority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote a
concurring opinion while also signing Thomas', said it was significant that
the program in the Tecumseh, Okla., school district "preserves an option
for a conscientious objector" by limiting the scope to students in
extracurricular activities. A student "can refuse testing while paying a
price (nonparticipation) that is serious, but less severe than expulsion,"
Breyer said.

Students who are found to be using drugs at Tecumseh High School are barred
from their activities and referred for counseling, but are not otherwise
disciplined or reported to the police.

The policy was challenged by Lindsay Earls, an honor student active in
several activities who is now attending Dartmouth College.

Earls lost her case in federal district court in Oklahoma City, but won
last year in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. That court
examined the Supreme Court's 1995 ruling in Vernonia School District v.
Acton and said that the athletes-only precedent did not validate the
broader Tecumseh policy.

The Tecumseh program violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against
unreasonable searches, the appeals court ruled.

In his opinion overturning that decision yesterday, Thomas said the
Tecumseh program was "entirely reasonable" in light of the "nationwide
epidemic of drug use" among school-age children.

While the Tecumseh district did not now appear to have a serious problem,
he said, "it would make little sense to require a school district to wait
for a substantial portion of its students to begin using drugs before it
was allowed to institute a drug testing program designed to deter drug use."

The decision, Board of Education v. Earls, No. 01-332, was joined by Chief
Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M.
Kennedy as well as Breyer.

The dissenters were Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens, and
David H. Souter, all of whom were in the minority in the court's
athletes-only ruling in 1995, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had concurred in
the earlier decision.

In a dissenting opinion yesterday, which the other three dissenters joined,
Ginsburg said the two cases were significantly different.

In the first, she said, the court "concluded that a public school district
facing a disruptive and explosive drug abuse problem sparked by members of
its athletic teams had 'special needs' that justified suspicionless testing
of district athletes as a condition of their athletic participation."

But she said the 1995 opinion "cannot be read to endorse invasive and
suspicionless drug testing of all students." Had the court in the
Vernonia case "agreed that public school attendance, in and of itself,
permitted the state to test each student's blood or urine for drugs," she
continued, "the opinion in Vernonia could have saved many words."

Thomas said in the majority opinion that the differences in the two cases
were "not essential." The earlier decision did not depend on the
program's details, but on a"the school's custodial responsibility and
authority," he said.

Thomas added that it would not necessarily be less intrusive to require
that drug testing be based on suspicions of particular students.

That approach "might unfairly target members of unpopular groups" and place
added burdens, including fear of lawsuits, on teachers and administrators,
he said.