COURT OKS RANDOM DRUG TESTS IN SCHOOLS

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court approved random drug tests for many
public high school students Thursday, ruling that schools' interest in
ridding their campuses of drugs outweighs an individual's right to privacy.
The 5-4 decision would allow the broadest drug testing the court has yet
permitted for young people whom authorities have no particular reason to
suspect of wrongdoing. It applies to students who join competitive
after-school activities or teams, a category that includes many if not most
middle-school and high-school students.

Previously these tests had been allowed only for student athletes. "We find
that testing students who participate in extracurricular activities is a
reasonably effective means of addressing the school district's legitimate
concerns in preventing, deterring and detecting drug use," Justice Clarence
Thomas wrote for himself, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices
Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen Breyer.

The court stopped short of allowing random tests for any student, whether
or not involved in extracurricular activities, but several justices have
indicated they are interested in answering that question at some point.

The court ruled against a former Oklahoma high school honor student who
competed on an academic quiz team and sang in the choir. Lindsay Earls, a
self-described "goodie two-shoes," tested negative but sued over what she
called a humiliating and accusatory policy.

The Pottawatomie County school system had considered testing all students.
Instead, it settled for testing only those involved in extracurricular
activities on the theory that by voluntarily representing the school, those
students had a lower expectation of privacy than did students at large.

The ruling is a follow-up to a 1995 case, in which the court allowed random
urine tests for student athletes. In that case, the court found that the
school had a pervasive drug problem and that athletes were among the users.
The court also found that athletes had less expectation of privacy.

Thursday's ruling is the logical next step, the Oklahoma school and its
backers said, and the court majority agreed.

"The particular testing program upheld today is not reasonable, it is
capricious, even perverse," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the
dissenters. In a brief, separate dissent, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and
David Souter said they disagreed with the court's ruling in 1995 and
disagree now.

Of the estimated 14 million American high school students, better than 50
percent probably participate in some form of organized after-school
activity, educators say. The trend is toward ever greater extracurricular
participation, largely because colleges consider it a factor in admissions.

Earls and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the Oklahoma
school board could not show that drugs were a big problem at Tecumseh High
School. She claimed the "suspicionless" drug tests violated the
Constitution's guarantee against unreasonable searches.

Pottawatomie educators, backed by the Bush administration, argued that any
drug problem is a concern. Also, the school said, the drug tests were a
deterrent for students who knew they could not participate in favorite
activities unless they stayed clean.

During oral arguments in the case in March, a Bush administration lawyer
said universal testing would be constitutional, even though a lawyer for
the Oklahoma school said she doubted that would be so.

Numerous schools installed drug testing programs for athletes after the
1995 ruling, but wider drug testing remains relatively rare among the
nation's 15,500 public school districts. Lower courts have reached
differing conclusions about the practice.

The Tecumseh testing program ran for part of two school years, beginning in
1998. It was suspended after Earls and another student sued. Earls is now a
student at Dartmouth College.

The Tecumseh policy covered a range of voluntary clubs and sports,
including the Future Farmers of America club, cheerleading and football.
Students were tested at the beginning of the school year. Thereafter, tests
were random. Overall, 505 high school students were tested for drug use.
Three students, all of them athletes, tested positive.

A federal appeals court ruled against the program, saying it took the
Supreme Court's 1995 ruling too far. Sports are different from other
extracurricular activities, the lower court said, and the school had not
done enough to show that students who participated in those activities were
abusing drugs. The school district appealed to the Supreme Court.

The case is Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of
Pottawatomie County v. Earls, 01-332.