One more reason to homeschool.

Yes, I’m aware this is an unusual case. The attitude of the school administrators is sadly not unusual: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103215199

Supreme Court To Hear School Strip-Search Case

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday on whether school administrators may strip-search a student based on mere suspicion that the student may possess drugs.

Savana Redding was a 13-year-old honors student with no prior disciplinary record when she was called out of class by the assistant principal of her school in Safford, Ariz., in 2003. A self-described nerd, Redding says she wasn’t worried.

“I’ve never been in trouble, so I didn’t think there was anything I could possibly have done to be in trouble,” Redding says.

Although there were plenty of signs in the questions put to Redding, she says she did not understand that the assistant principal thought she might be hiding drugs.

Redding readily agreed to have her backpack searched. When that didn’t turn up anything, she was ordered to follow the secretary into the nurse’s office.

Strip-Searched

Redding says she was then asked to strip down to her underwear and stood there while the nurse and secretary inspected her clothes and shoes.

“Then, you know, I thought they were going to let me put my clothes back on, but instead they asked me to pull out my bra and shake it, and the crotch on my underwear, too,” Redding says.

Redding says her whole body was visible to the school administrators. She kept her head down so the nurse and the secretary couldn’t see her fighting back tears.

“When you’re that age, you’re going through puberty, [and] you’re embarrassed of your body as it is,” Redding says. “Let alone to have to sit there and stand pretty much naked in front of professional people that you would see every day almost. It’s just pretty horrible.”

School officials found nothing, but Redding was not allowed to return to class that day. She just sat for hours in the administrative office, watching other students go by.

Redding says she developed stomach ulcers after the incident, didn’t return to school for months and ultimately transferred to another school. Her mother, a nurse’s aide, believed her daughter was violated. She reported school authorities to the police and ultimately, with her daughter, sued for damages.

The School’s Argument

In its brief, the school says the fact that Redding was an honors student who had never been in trouble before is not evidence of good conduct, but only evidence that she had never been caught.

The school views itself as a protector of its students’ health and safety, which includes protecting students from both illegal and over-the-counter drugs. From the school’s viewpoint, any suspicion that a student possesses drugs may be justification for a strip search.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that schools may conduct searches of a student’s purse or backpack without a warrant, but the court did not then address the question of an intimate search.

The Safford officials in Tuesday’s case portray their schools as drug-infested and Redding as a likely suspect for a variety of reasons.

Among the reasons given to justify the search: One youngster had already ended up in the hospital from taking drugs, and another student had reported more drugs were about to be given out. School administrators said Redding was seen at a dance early in the year among a group of kids believed to have had alcohol on their breath. Probably most damaging, one youngster who had been found with 400 milligrams of prescription-strength ibuprofen said on the day of the search that she got it from Redding.

‘The Totality Of Circumstances’

“This is where you have to look at the totality of the circumstances in the case,” says Matthew Wright, lawyer for the school district.

When asked whether such an extensive search made sense for a pill that is the equivalent of two Advil, Wright says school officials cannot have known these were the only pills.

“With hindsight and with calm reflection, we can look back and say, ‘OK, what kind of danger really was there on campus?’ ” Wright says. “But when you’re on the ground making on-the-spot decisions, you don’t have that luxury. School administrators are not pharmacologically trained in being able to assess the relative dangers any one drug might present, but what they are charged with is to make sure that students are kept safe from such threats of danger.”

Redding’s lawyer, Adam Wolf, counters that a strip search is entirely different from a search of a purse or a backpack.

“Children call their private parts their private parts for a reason. They not subject to exposure, to observation by school officials. When children are strip-searched, they experience trauma that’s similar in kind and degree to sexual abuse,” says Wolf.

School lawyer Wright counters, “We just have to ask ourselves, as a policy matter, do you really want a drug-free environment? And if you do, then there are going to be some privacy invasions when there is reason to suspect that those drugs are being dispensed on campus, that they’re being used by students.”

Constitutional Questions

The question for the Supreme Court is where the Constitution draws the line: Do school administrators have virtual free rein in determining what justifies a strip search?

In this case, for instance, the only direct piece of evidence linking Redding to drugs at all came from a childhood friend. When asked why the friend would make up such a story, Redding said she really didn’t know — that maybe she was scared, or embarrassed.

“We weren’t really friends anymore, because she was gravitating more towards the gothic group, and she started wearing more black and smoking cigarettes, and she didn’t really want to hang out with me anymore because she was embarrassed of me because I was a nerd,” Redding says.

Redding’s lawyer says the implications of the school’s decision are worrisome for students across the country.

“The school took an everyday occurrence, which is finger-pointing or tattling, and turned it into a life-altering event. If the Supreme Court allows a strip search based on these minimal facts, children across the country need to be concerned that when they enter school every day, there’s a chance that they very well could be strip-searched.”

Redding is now in college. She is a psychology major, hoping to be a counselor for teenagers in the future. She has taken her first plane trip to be at Tuesday’s Supreme Court argument and admits she’s nervous.

12 thoughts on “One more reason to homeschool.

  1. cos

    I’ve been following this case for probably over a year (every new development in it reliably hits the front page of reddit), but I think it makes no argument whatsoever about public schools. People in authority abuse vulnerable people in a multitude of contexts. Most sexual assaults on teens happen on the job, for example, usually by their supervisors/bosses. Police mistreat random people on city streets. There’s nothing about this particular case to suggest that any child faces a higher threat of mistreatment at school than anywhere else.

    Reply
    1. Krissy Gibbs Post author

      The attitude of “guilty until proven innocent” is rather pervasive in schools. Students are treated as if they are all horrible people who are bent on doing awful things. I watched that attitude from my administration and from other teachers. I am not interested in putting my child in an atmosphere where authority will say, “The fact that Redding was an honors student who had never been in trouble before is not evidence of good conduct, but only evidence that she had never been caught.” Of course I can’t protect my child forever and I’m not going to try. However I see no need to send my child to an institution where she will receive a questionable education and be treated like a criminal. Of course the argument will be made that I could simply move to a better district but I think that is rather beside the point. I know for sure how I will treat my kid.

      Reply
      1. cos

        The attitude of “guilty until proven innocent” is rather pervasive in schools.

        Ahh, that’s quite different from the meaning that I got from your post. What’s exception about the Savannah Redding case is the abuse of authority, and abuse of person, so I thought when you said “that attitude” that’s what you were referring to, and “one more reason” was “to protect your child from being abused”.

        It turns out you’re focusing on a tangent: the assumption that a child is up to no good. That wasn’t central to this particular case, and that attitude rarely leads to this kind of severe abuse, and you didn’t say anything specific about it in the post, so I actually had no idea that’s what you were talking about. Now that I see that, I understand what you mean (though I don’t think presenting the Redding case as an example of it is quite right, because this case illustrates something else in addition to “that attitude”, and the something else it illustrates happens to overshadow it nearly completely).

        Reply
        1. Krissy Gibbs Post author

          I said, “The attitude of the administrators is not unusual” not the “actions”. I think that this particular action is very unusual. I think it is pretty rare that an administrator would have the balls to do something like this.

          I’m sorry that me posting an article largely without comment is misleading for you. I don’t think that it will change my future behavior. 🙂

          I actually did make a comment. You are right. I didn’t go into detail though. That is still unlikely to change because I don’t have that much uninterrupted typing time to think through stuff at length right now.

          Reply
          1. japlady

            I’m wondering if schools in general have changed in this way, or if its area dependent.

            Going to New Trier, a school where 95% of kids went to college if they weren’t entering the military, and a large sloth of us were expected to go to top 10’s, and honestly I knew of NO teen pregnancies while I was there and only a few girls who had lost their virginities… I may have had a distorted high school experience.

            We were all treated like basically good kids, and if any of us acted out they immediatly went into “there must be problems at home” mode.

          2. paulaandandrew

            AH! North Shore girl. I moved to Evanston back in 1976 during my senior year of college (DePaul).

            New Trier enjoys an excellent rep for a public school.

          3. japlady

            Common joke on the north shore back when I was going to New Trier

            Q: “Whats the difference between chunky peanut butter, and the girls at new trier?”

            A: “Chunky peanut butter spreads easier”

  2. notmy_realname

    Thank goodness you’re in America

    (for as long as our ever-diminishing freedoms remain) .

    In Germany, homeschooling is explicitly illegal, and attempts to do so result in the court taking your children away and putting them in foster care, completely regardless of how well educated and adjusted your child is.

    Reply
  3. mackelzinzie

    I’m recently of the opinion that a lot of shit administrators do serve as a learning experiance about how life isn’t fair.

    Something as traumatically close to sexual assault like that is worth fussing over, sure. But kids are apt to go about complaining that every little thing is unfair and that their life sucks, if we shelter them that much. (I have evidence)

    I’ll probably homeschool my kids some of the time, when I have kids, but not the whole time. Its important to learn how to deal with stupid people and stupid situations.

    For example, if you never have to deal with that administrator, you wont learn how to tackle his sorts of arguments. Well, maybe you will. Maybe you wont, even if you do deal with him.

    Most important is realizing that sucky things happen, and then life goes on.

    Reply

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