Pubdate: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 Source: Ledger, The (FL) Copyright: 1999 The Ledger Contact: P.O. Box 408 Lakeland FL 33802 Fax: 863-802-7849 Feedback: http://www.theledger.com/editorial/letters/letter.htm Website: http://www.theledger.com/ Bookmark: MAP's shortcut to The Lockney Policy items: http://www.mapinc.org/lockney.htm SHAKING DOWN THE SCHOOLS For the sake of argument, let's imagine that the area around Lake Morton in central Lakeland became infested with drugs and gun-toting murderers. The police could set up roadblocks on Mississippi Avenue and South Boulevard and other roads leading in and out of the lake neighborhood. It could systematically stop every car and search everyone for drugs and weapons. Even the swans. The strategy would prove effective quickly, cleaning up the place of illegal weapons and scaring off the drug dealers. But it would be illegal, and it would incense the same residents who had clamored for a more secure neighborhood. Not keen on neighborhood shakedowns, Americans don't like random intrusions in their private lives, even in the name of security. We're not a banana republic, or even the French Republic, where such intrusions can be routine, and where you're presumed guilty until proven innocent. Yet we're heading that way. Using the drug war for justification, the U.S. Supreme Court has been whittling away at such protections as the Fourth Amendment's against unreasonable searches. Employers routinely drug-test their employees whether the job depends on a reefer-free cerebrum (like driving a school bus or controlling air traffic) or not. Schools search lockers at will. Government dogs sniff air passengers' luggage without their consent. Five years ago the court opened the way for schools to drug-test athletes, randomly or systematically. It wasn't intentional, but the Supreme Court has opened the door to abuses. Some schools are now interpreting the legality to drug-test athletes as justification to drug-test all students. In Texas, a state that tends to read laws in a Judge Roy Bean sort of way, two school districts are requiring mandatory drug-testing of every high school junior and senior -- the equivalent of setting up roadblocks around a neighborhood and searching everyone coming in and out, regardless of probable cause. Only one parent has objected. Larry Tannahill, a fourth-generation resident of the Texas Panhandle community, a farmer and father of two boys, is taking the Lockney school district to court. He'll probably win: No court in the nation has condoned mandatory drug testing of all students, and the Supreme Court last year struck down an Indiana law that required students suspended for drug use to take a urine test before being allowed back in school. What is remarkable in Texas is how enthusiastically the policies have been accepted in the two school districts. Tannahill is suffering the blistering ostracism that is every small town's gift to dissenters. He's lost his job. He's received a death threat. People wish he'd just leave. They're scared of drugs. They have reason to be. The Texas Panhandle's docility toward the school districts' drug policies, and the viciousness shown Tannahill, indicate a deep gulf between public sentiment and the law. The gulf won't vanish with a judge's decision to restore constitutional order. The public is becoming infatuated with iron-fisted rules as substitutes for more sensible, if sometimes more costly, approaches. Shakedowns don't belong in schools. Schools can police their halls far better than the police can police a city street. Especially in smaller schools, students are -- or should be -- under an adult's supervision at all times. Teachers know their students, coaches know their athletes. They suspect drug use? Let them open their eyes and ears, build a case and target their suspicions narrowly. Let them make better use of the "school resource officer" (a hallway cop). Casting a wide net to catch a few offenders makes the school's job easier. But laziness is no excuse for skirting the rigors of a fairer approach. As Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her dissent in the athletes' case five years ago, "intrusive, blanket searches of school children, most of whom are innocent, for evidence of serious wrongdoing are not part of any traditional school function of which I am aware. Indeed, many schools, like parents, prefer to trust their children unless given reason to do otherwise." Trusting his son Brady, Tannahill is doing nothing less than standing by one of the principles his neighbors take for granted: He'd like Brady to be presumed innocent. It's not a lot to ask for. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake