RESEARCH General Law

LEGAL RIGHTS
Increased security measures in schools send 'wrong message' to youth

Mark Reutter, Business and Law Editor
(217) 333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu

4/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Efforts are again under way after last month's shooting deaths of two high school pupils in San Diego to restrict the movement and freedom of students in the name of school safety.

Following the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and other highly publicized cases of youth violence, schools have equipped themselves with metal detectors, security guards, surveillance cameras and even search dogs to combat youth violence and drug use. Increasingly, students are given limited access to school property, even bathrooms, while school authorities exercise greater latitude to search student property in lockers and cars without a warrant.

Many of these security measures are not only overly broad in their application, but are sending "the wrong message" to young people, a University of Illinois-trained legal scholar argues.

"Most states have enacted school search statutes with the express purpose of fostering an environment more conducive to learning, but the lessons students take away from their encounter with authority figures may run counter to the states' intentions," J. Bates McIntyre wrote in the University of Illinois Law Review. She now is a clerk for U.S. District Judge Elaine E. Bucklo.

"Heavy-handed school search policies foster distrust between students and administrators. An encounter pursuant to an expansive school search policy is likely to impress upon a student that he or she is inherently untrustworthy or that people who have authority may wield it without regard to individual liberties."

Supreme Court rulings do give authorities the discretion to conduct searches for drugs and weapons on school property without violating Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure. Warrantless searches of student property are legal so long as there is a "reasonable suspicion" of illegality. For example, schools may administer random drug tests to student athletes without the students’ consent.

In addition, case law has favored the interpretation that students, by attending school, give "implied consent" for warrantless searches, similar to travelers at airports who must submit to X-ray machines and metal detectors.

McIntyre, however, questioned the need for such "heavy-handed" measures as drug sweeps by search dogs and strip searches by police, when statistics show that U.S. schools are among the safest places that a child can be. Every year, guns kill about 3,000 children outside of school. The 12 students killed at Columbine was about the same as the number of children who die every three days from abuse or neglect at the hands of parents and guardians, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"Perhaps school administrators' time would be better spent maintaining educational programs that discourage drug use or use of violence to solve student problems rather than shadowboxing against problems that may not exist," she concluded.