Long time readers will recall my first post about Savana Redding, the 13 year old 8th grade honor student who was subject to a strip search and body cavity inspection at school for fear that she possessed ibuprofen. The case will be argued before the Supreme Court on April 21st, and Adam Liptak garnered a front page piece about the case in yesterday’s New York Times.

The case will require the justices to consider the thorny question of just how much leeway school officials should have in policing zero-tolerance policies for drugs and violence, and the court is likely to provide important guidance to schools around the nation.

You betcha.  For those of you unfamiliar with what happened to Savana, here’s a synopsis:

Savana Redding, an eighth grade honor roll student at Safford Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, was pulled from class on October 8, 2003 by the school’s vice principal, Kerry Wilson.  Earlier that day, Wilson had discovered [drugs] in the possession of Redding’s classmate….Under questioning and faced with punishment, the classmate claimed that Redding, who had no history of disciplinary problems or substance abuse, had given her the [drugs].

 

After escorting Redding to his office, Wilson presented Redding with the [drugs] and informed her of her classmate’s accusations. Redding said she had never seen the [drugs] before and agreed to a search of her possessions, wanting to prove she had nothing to hide. Joined by a female school administrative assistant, Wilson searched Redding’s backpack and found nothing. Instructed by Wilson, the administrative assistant then took Redding to the school nurse’s office in order to perform a strip search. 

In the school nurse’s office, Redding was ordered to strip to her underwear. She was then commanded to pull her bra out and to the side, exposing her breasts, and to pull her underwear out at the crotch, exposing her pelvic area. The strip search failed to uncover any [drugs].

The 9th Circuit held that the school violated Savanna’s 4th Amendment right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure.  Somehow, that doesn’t quite capture the wrong here for me.  Not even close.

Had Savanna been my daughter, and some school district grocery clerk explained to me that he had to have my daughter strip searched because of their zero-tolerance policy on drugs, I might consider asking Jdog if I could borrow some blued-steel for an hour or two.  I am not a violent man, but there are places that no school official should ever go.  This is one of them.

The district provided further explanation about why Savana was a potential threat to others in justification of their actions.

In a sworn statement submitted in the case, Safford Unified School District v. Redding, No. 08-479, Mr. Wilson said he had good reason to suspect Ms. Redding. She and other students had been unusually rowdy at a school dance a couple of months before, and members of the school staff thought they had smelled alcohol. A student also accused Ms. Redding of having served alcohol at a party before the dance, Mr. Wilson said.

Now I’m no expert on effects of ibuprofen, but I am unaware of the causal connection between students  being “unusually rowdy,” whatever that means, months before and the theoretical ingestion of Tylenol. Are they suggesting that ibuprofen is the new heroin?  As for the the claim of alcohol, again raising the causal connection problem, it seems that any accusation is good enough around this school.  No need for anything more.

So what does Savana say about these accusations of horrible conduct:

Ms. Redding said she had served only soda at the party, adding that her accuser was not there. At the dance, she said, school administrators had confused adolescent rambunctiousness with inebriation. “We’re kids,” she said. “We’re goofy.”

Thirteen year old girls act “goofy”?  Is that possible?  Could that happen?  Well, we certainly can’t expect grocery clerks to believe the accused, since honor students are so naturally inclined to lie to cover their substance abuse.  And besides, then they wouldn’t have gotten the chance to strip search Savana, and what fun would that have been?

But cooler heads than mine have a different take.

Richard Arum, who teaches sociology and education at New York University, said he would have handled the incident differently. But Professor Arum said the Supreme Court should proceed cautiously.

“Do we really want to encourage cases,” Professor Arum asked, “where students and parents are seeking monetary damages against educators in such school-specific matters where reasonable people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances?”

It’s unclear to me what Arum is trying to say.  Is his problem with monetary damages?  Is he just an educator sycophant, believing the school officials can do no wrong?  Or perhaps he gets his jollies thinking about 13 year olds being strip searched?  It’s unclear.  But he is dead wrong about one thing.  Reasonable people cannot disagree that this was sick and abusive.  No reasonable person can believe that a school official was reasonable in strip searching Savana in search of ibuprofen.  Mind you, there was no evidence beyond the claim of another student that she got prescription strength ibuprofen (the equivalent of two non-prescription Tylenol), but this doesn’t factor in as a critical piece in any event. 

The school district’s argument is based on the knee-jerk love that grocery clerks have for zero-tolerance.  It makes for fabulous rules, and grocery clerks love rules.  It makes them powerful and clear, and grocery clerks love to be powerful and clear.  It allows them to do anything they “have to do,” and this “just had to be done.”  Why?  It was the rule.

It will be interesting to see whether the Justices focus on the search and seizure issue, the legal basis for the 9th Circuit’s ruling, or the broader, more meaningful issue for the real world.  What business do school officials have strip searching students?  If there is something so dire, so mission critical, so threatening to the health and safety of other students, that it demands such extreme action, then why not turn it over to the police to handle. 

While an awfully good argument can be made that the police are more dangerous to young women than school grocery clerks, a secondary commentary on how our protectors in government treat the vulnerable in their care, there are similarly more appropriate safeguards and remedies imposed on those trained and charged in law enforcement as opposed to grocery clerks all swollen with the power and importance.

The fact that this happened, that it is a subject of any debate at all, is a reflection of our diseased vision of personal autonomy and integrity in the age of fear.  Let this happen to your daughter and see which side of the line you support.  Short of having damn good reason to believe that a student is concealing a deadly weapon on his person with imminent intent to use it, and I have some difficulty picturing that circumstance ever occurring, I can think of no situation where a school official should ever have the authority to do this to a child.  There is a depth to which no one is entitled to go, and what was done to Savana Redding went there.

Let’s hope that someone, maybe even a majority, on the Supremes sees clearly that our schools, in the name of fear, have gone off the deep end and put a stop to it.  We don’t send our children to school for this.

Update:  I realize that some of you feel that I may be, well, a bit shy about expressing my opinions.  I know, but it’s hard to come out of my shell.  So for those of you seeking a less circumspect approach, I offer this view from Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking, located by my ever-vigilant hinterlands correspondent, Kathleen.  Short Shorts Girl includes some valuable insight that I was unable to bring to the discussion, such as:

We shouldn’t be surprised. The nation’s fine educational system is being systematically undermined by hordes of middle school kids gulping Ibuprofen pills, which have been secreted in the vaginas of little girls.

Who knew? Then there’s this hidden camera photo of Nurse Peggy, who is charged with personal inspections below the waste after Office Secretary Helen makes sure there are no weapons down there.



But on a more serious note, this little throw away to the hard right:

[The School District is] represented by famed pannysniffer Ken Starr. Lets hope that SCOTUS makes short order of this, so that Judge Starr can get back to his true mission–for surely somewhere in the country there is a politician engaging in illicit blowjobs.

In light of this high-powered, and SCOTUS loved advocate, Short Shorts Girl fears that this case could create the “Advil Exception” to the Fourth.  Keep your eyes peeled.