Strip Searched

The Los Angeles Times reports:

When Savana Redding, now 19, talks of what happened to her in eighth grade, it is clear that the painful memories linger.

She speaks of being embarrassed and fearful and of staying away from school for two months. And she recalls the “whispers” and “stares” from others in this small eastern Arizona mining town after she was strip-searched in the nurse’s office because a vice principal suspected she might be hiding extra-strength ibuprofen in her underwear.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear her case. Its decision, the first to address the issue of strip-searches in schools, will set legal limits, if any, on the authority of school officials to search for drugs or weapons on campus.

If limits on searches are imposed, the school district warns, its ability to keep all drugs out of its schools would be reduced.

Thoughts:

— The school district’s ability to keep students from being strip searched and humiliated is going to be reduced if they continue strip searching and humiliating students!

— The ability to keep all drugs out of school will also be reduced by a prohibition against cavity searches, waterboarding suspected drug users to elicit confessions, and public floggings of any student caught with drugs on campus. So, school officials, do you really think “this will help us keep drugs off campus” is a sufficient argument?

— Note how imprecise language is leading to absurdity here. Due to the broad consensus that “drugs have no place on campus,” school administrators implement zero tolerance policies that ought to apply to substances like heroin, cocaine and marijuana… but somehow “drugs” come to be defined in a way that ibuprofen is treated as a threat sufficiently grave to strip search students, fight costly lawsuits, etc. Among the populace, few people are worried about their children being exposed to slightly stronger versions of over-the-counter painkillers at school, but authorities trade on the fact that both substances fall under the broad category “drugs” to implement their ridiculous policies.