Orange Police Searching School Buses for Drugs : Law enforcement: Some question constitutionality and impact of random checks requested by district.

City of Orange police, acting at the behest of school officials, have begun randomly searching school buses for drugs, ordering children off the vehicles and boarding them with drug-sniffing dogs.

The new policy, billed as an effort to discourage students from bringing illegal substances onto school grounds, has been carried out three times since Oct. 30, most recently Wednesday afternoon at Portola Middle School.

“We have a legal right to check out our equipment,” said Richard Donoghue, interim acting superintendent of the Orange Unified School District. “We’re not trying to arrest anybody, we’re just trying to stop drugs on our campuses.”

The searches, believed to be the first ever in California, were triggered by telephone complaints about marijuana possession or use on one or more buses, but no drugs have been found. Parents and civil libertarians have raised concerns about the constitutionality of such searches and their possible impact on children as young as 11 years old who have been pulled off the buses.

The children are not physically searched themselves.

“We teach lessons of civics by both behavior and reading, and the lesson here is that they live in a police state,” said Martin Guggenheim, a New York University law professor and co-author of the book “Rights of Young People.”

“We don’t search citizens if we don’t suspect they have done anything wrong,” he said.

“That’s a new angle on it for me,” added Susie Lange, director of public relations for the state Department of Education. “We’ve heard of that sort of thing done with lockers, but not on buses.”

Lange added that most of the school drug searches she is aware of come after authorities have some strong suspicion that they might find drugs during the search.

Moreover, several Orange City Council members and three members of the Orange Unified School District Board of Education say that while they support the searches, they did not know about them until contacted by a reporter this week.

“I support the Police Department in its efforts,” said school Trustee Barry Resnick, “but I think the board needs to be aware this is being done.”

Orange Mayor Gene Beyer said he had never heard of the searches.

“I’d have to check with the (police) chief,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to make a comment until I checked with him.”

Orange Councilman Mike Spurgeon said he was not opposed to the bus searches as long as students were given advance warning.

“A bus is an extension of school property,” Spurgeon said, adding that children “don’t have to get on the bus.”

On Friday, Donoghue faxed a letter to school board members, reminding them that he he had discussed the matter with them in closed sessions.

“At the time I informed the board, the consensus was that this was a positive step in keeping our school sites free of drugs and have continued to schedule further activities in this vein,” the letter reads in part.

Orange police officers have boarded buses selected at random by Donoghue either before they unload students at school or before they leave schools at the end of the day. They ask the students to get off the bus.

But the students must leave all their possessions behind so that a dog trained in drug detection can sniff the vehicle and their belongings.

In addition to the search at Portola, a bus bound for Santiago Middle School and El Modena High School was searched Oct. 30 as a result of complaints of marijuana possession or use on at least one school bus. On the same day, a bus returning from Orange High School was also searched.

The Orange Police Department and the Orange Unified School District say the Orange County district attorney’s office advised them that the searches were legal as long as the children themselves were not searched.

“The police talked to the district attorney’s office and the advice was: as long as we are searching our equipment and our buses, we are within our rights,” Donoghue said. “But if we decide to put everyone against the wall and turn out their their pockets, we’d be on touchy ground.”

Jeff Ferguson, deputy district attorney with the agency’s narcotics enforcement unit, said “there is no expectation of privacy on empty buses. They are akin to locker cases. I don’t think they need probable cause to run a dog by anyone’s possessions on a school campus.”

In order to avoid singling out any one group of students, the district decided to randomly search several buses.

“If you do a few (searches) and not everybody, you are implying that these schools are having a problem and others aren’t,” Donoghue said.

Arnold Fege, director of government relations for the national Parent-Teacher Assn. in Washington, said this was the first time he had ever heard of authorities randomly searching school buses for drugs without probable cause.

“But I’m not surprised at all by this,” Fege said. “School districts, especially urban ones, have been wrestling with the issue for a long time. They are trying to balance off constitutional rights of the individual with protecting students’ safety.”

Not all district officials agree that random searches are the best way to combat illegal drug use.

“I think there are lots of ways to solve and investigate these kinds of problems when they exist, and if all else fails . . . I would support it,” said Gail Richards, principal of El Modena High School. Some students from the high school were on a bus searched at Santiago Middle School on Oct. 30, as a result of parent complaints to school and district officials.

“We were aware of a problem with a student on that bus, but we had dealt with the problem about a week beforehand and taken disciplinary action against the student,” Richards said. “I felt the problem had been solved before the search took place.”

One parent of a sixth-grader came to Portola Middle School on Thursday to complain about the search, said David Gunderson, principal at the school.

“Her daughter was a little upset and didn’t know what was going on,” Gunderson said. The mother “was also concerned that maybe we had drugs on campus and there was some basis for the search. I assured her we had no basis for it, hadn’t asked for it and she seemed more comfortable.”

“I have mixed emotions,” added Marty Castro, president of the Orange High School Parent-Teacher-Student Assn. A bus from the high school was searched Oct. 30. “Kids don’t have any business having drugs on a school bus, but they did the search out of the clear blue sky without parents being the initiators.

“It’s just bizarre. I don’t know who they are trying to catch. If my daughter had been on that bus, I wouldn’t have been happy unless I could have informed her first. . . . It would have been a very traumatic situation.”

But other parents said they supported the district’s actions.

“Speaking as a parent, I don’t think it was that big of a deal,” said Karen Huffman, president of the Santiago Middle School Parent-Teacher-Student Assn. “I feel strongly that if someone on a bus had drugs, I would want to know about it.”

It remains unclear how school officials and police would react if drugs were found on a bus.

Donoghue said a police investigation would be triggered if any drugs were found. But a police official said arresting students with drugs is less important than keeping the drugs off school property.

“It’s more to send a message. If you do dope, don’t do it in school,” said Sgt. Tom Jordan of the Orange Police Department’s juvenile unit. “I don’t know that we would have prosecuted a kid. . . . We’re just going to handle it on a case-by-case basis.”

Principals at Orange and El Modena high schools and Santiago Middle School said they had not received any complaints from parents since the searches took place.

In fact, principals at the four schools said their only complaint with the process was that they wished they had received advance notice of the searches.

“I’d like to have a little more notice than right at the time, but we got through it just fine,” Gunderson said. “The search probably took 20 or 25 minutes, and the kids seemed to roll with it very well. They didn’t seem concerned or upset.”

The Orange Unified School District, which transports 4,500 children to school on 68 buses each day, is not the only district concerned with problems aboard the vehicles. Ocean View School District, with schools in Huntington Beach and Westminster, has purchased 12 video cameras that will be placed on buses for surveillance of vandalism, discipline problems and drug activities.

The cameras will be rotated among the district’s 24 buses and bus drivers will view the tapes before and after trips.

“Just having them there will make a big difference,” predicted Ocean View Supt. James Tarwater.

Times correspondents Bob Barker, Shelby Grad and Terry Spencer contributed to this story.