Expanded drug tests in schools? The Supreme Court considers whether more students should be checked.

• Author: Vilbig, Peter
• Position: National

National

If you find yourself being marched to the school bathroom next fall with a plastic cup in your hand, don't blame Lindsay Earls.

Earls was randomly called out of choir class at her rural Oklahoma high school three years ago and ushered into a bathroom stall while her math teacher, music teacher, and cheerleading coach listened on the other side of the door for the sound of urine hitting a plastic cup.

"It was really uncomfortable," Earls recalled recently. "And it was embarrassing. I really felt my privacy was invaded."

TEST CASE

She protested the drug test in a lawsuit, arguing that it violated her protection against illegal search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She lost at the local level, but won on appeal. Her school board took the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could rule in the next few weeks.

Her case, Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottawatomie County v. Earls, will determine whether high schools nationwide can vastly expand drug-testing programs.

The battle over student rights goes back to the Supreme Court's 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines School District, which held that students do not "shed their constitutional rights ... at the schoolhouse gate." But since then, a series of cases has opened the way for police searches of student lockers and backpacks even when students aren't suspected of breaking the law.

The Supreme Court has already ruled once in favor of expanded drug testing. In 1995, the Court determined that schools can require drug tests of student athletes when a drug problem is shown to exist. During the past three years, student athletes have faced mandatory drug tests in about 5 percent of schools nationwide, according to a University of Michigan study.

But the ruling left unclear how much further drug testing could go. In the past three years, about 2 percent of schools decided to test all students involved in extracurricular activities. One such school was in Tecumseh, Okla., where Earls was a member of the high school's show choir and academic team, which competes in statewide quiz competitions.

INSIDE THE COURT

Addressing the Supreme Court, lawyers for the Oklahoma school board and the American Civil Liberties Union, a civil rights group representing Earls, had barely begun presenting their cases when several Justices started asking questions that revealed deep divisions over what rights the Constitution guarantees high school...