School Strip Search Going to the Supreme Court

A case involving the strip search of a middle school student in Arizona is going to the Supreme Court next week after it was declared illegal by the U.S. Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, which is the intermediate court at a federal level.
Some passages from the article in Education Week:

"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled last July that school officials violated Ms. Redding’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, acting 'contrary to all reason and common sense.'
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School Groups Split
A friend-of-the-court brief submitted by national groups representing school boards and administrators echoes this concern.
The 9th Circuit decision would “seriously undermine school districts’ efforts to address student drug abuse in an effective manner,” write lawyers for the National School Boards Association and the American Association of School Administrators, both based just outside Washington. The ruling “broadly [calls] into question the ability of school officials to make all practical searches—both minimally intrusive and more intrusive.”
However, the case has not united education groups. The 3.2 million-member National Education Association and the National Association of School Psychologists have weighed in on the other side, arguing that the strip-search was unconstitutional.
For its part, the federal government argues that the strip-search of Ms. Redding violated the Fourth Amendment.
“Strip-searches are impermissible in the public schools unless [school] officials reasonably suspect not only that the student possesses the contraband, but also that it is hidden in a place that such a search will reveal,” Acting U.S. Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler wrote in the March brief, also signed by lawyers from the U.S. Department of Education and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
The brief argues that while the decision to conduct “some form of search” was justified, the circumstances “did not justify extending the scope of the search to require [Ms. Redding] to disrobe to her bra and underwear and lift them off her body.”
At the same time, the federal lawyers argued that the school official who ordered the search was entitled to qualified immunity, because “the illegality of the search was not clearly established at the time they conducted it.”
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine established by the Supreme Court under which government officials are personally immune from being sued unless they violated clearly established constitutional or statutory rights about which a reasonable person would have known.
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A 'Reasonableness' Standard
The legal debate in the Redding case centers on a 1985 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in New Jersey v. T.L.O. It found that "the school setting requires some easing of the restrictions to which searches by public authorities are ordinarily subject."
The ruling spelled out a "reasonableness" standard for assessing the legality of searches of individual students conducted by school officials.
First, the ruling said, the search "must be justified at its inception." And second, it must be "reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place."
Lawyers involved in the Redding case suggest that it’s time for the Supreme Court to provide greater clarity on the reasonableness standard.
"Deciding the constitutional question in this case will also provide some desperately needed guidance to the lower courts and, more importantly, school officials," wrote lawyers for the Safford district."


New Jersey v. T.L.O. created the "reasonableness" standard for right to privacy in the school environment, saying that a warrant was unnecessary because of the need to maintain order within schools. But since students are required to go to school and the government, in essence, is in charge of the public school system, then shouldn't schools have a similar process as the adult world?

Assuming that the Supreme Court will refer to new Jersey v. T.L.O., the question is really how stringent to the requirements need to be for it to be reasonable to do a warrantless search at a school?


For the full article, go to: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/04/14/29search.h28.html?tkn=TLSFeSut1HydTTyhI72VyOsldFwW9z1Sw6Jk