Orange Schools Begin Searching Buses for Drugs

Police have begun randomly searching school buses for drugs, pulling youths off the vehicles on the way to or from school and boarding the buses with drug-sniffing dogs.

The school district 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 in California, were triggered by complaints about marijuana possession or use on a bus, but no drugs have been found to date. Parents and civil libertarians have raised concerns about the constitutionality of such searches and their possible impact on children as young as 11 who have been pulled off the buses.

The children themselves are not searched.

“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.”

“It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard of,” said Jim Lane, a technician for the state Department of Education’s public relations office in Sacramento. “That’s a new one for me.”

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

Orange City Councilman Mike Spurgeon said he didn’t have a problem with the bus searches as long as students were given advance warning.

Orange police officers have boarded buses selected at random by Donoghue. Students must leave all their possessions behind so a dog trained in drug detection can sniff the vehicle and their belongings.

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