Opinion: Strip searches by schools? No, it’s never OK

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The editorial board today called for a narrower approach to strip searches of students at schools, saying that school officials should have a reasonable suspicion that a student is carrying contraband.

Having a reason is always better than not having a reason, I suppose, but I cannot imagine circumstances under which it would be acceptable for school officials to strip-search a student. Our society has of late been all too willing to turn educators into cops--and the educators have been all too willing to go along. Thus we had the recent case of school administrators at Porter Middle School in Granada Hills who are accused of setting up their own little campus drug sting, talking a young boy into buying marijuana from another student. What on earth would give educators reason to think they could do such a thing? The belief that law enforcement is written into the job description.

I’m no apologist for kids who bring drugs on campus, but if there’s a situation at school serious enough to call for a strip search, it’s serious enough to call the police--and the child’s parents. Do parents now have to advise their children not to speak to school authorities when they are hauled into the office, to warn them not to submit to strip searches and to make sure they know to have their parents called before they say a word?

Educators aren’t lawyers, they aren’t police and they don’t know how to do these things properly--nor should they. I would think school officials themselves would never want to be seen as menacing law-enforcement types. Students are supposed to trust them, to talk to them. In the case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, a middle-school girl, Savana Redding, was ordered in 2003 under the supervision of a nurse to strip to her underwear, then stretch the underwear so anything loose would fall out, because another student had accused her of carrying prescription-strength ibuprofen. (The search found none.) School nurses--when they exist at all--are the figures students turn to when they are ill or hurting. We would want children in our society to feel comfortable going to these people when they have been abused or molested or face other serious troubles.

Happily, California bans strip searches by schools. I know of no examples in this state where terrible things happened because of the law, no cases in which a principal or school nurse has said, ‘If only I’d been able to strip-search the kid, it would have saved everyone.’ But if anyone has heard of such cases, it would be interesting to know about them.