Pubdate: Thu, 19 Feb 2015 Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON) Copyright: 2015 Postmedia Network Inc. Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html Website: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326 Author: Marian Scott Page: C5 QUEBEC BACKTRACKS ON STRIP SEARCH STANCE Joyce Shanks doesn't want to contemplate what she'd do if her child were strip-searched at school. "I would lose it and so would my husband," said Shanks, whose daughter attends Grade 7 at a school in a Montreal suburb. The debate over the strip search of a 15-year-old girl at a Quebec City high school on Feb. 12 forced Education Minister Yves Bolduc to backtrack on comments made Tuesday that condoned the search of the girl, who was suspected of carrying marijuana. On Wednesday, he vowed to reexamine the policy allowing such searches by school staff. "We will ask a person external to and independent of the school board to evaluate what happened, write a report, and, at that moment, we will see based on the facts what we should do in the future," Bolduc said in the National Assembly. He told reporters the day before that school officials can strip search pupils on suspicion that they are selling drugs, as long as the search is done "respectfully" and according to the rules. He was commenting on a report saying staff at a high school in Quebec City instructed the pupil to remove her clothes and checked them for drugs. The school board that oversees Neufchatel High School said Tuesday it will launch its own investigation. Marie-Elaine Dion, a board spokeswoman, said such searches are "exceptional." "In our practices, only clothes are searched, not the individual. There is no direct contact with the student to frisk them," she said. Parti Quebecois education critic Nicole Leger said of the controversy. "All the parents of Quebec are troubled by this situation." She urged Bolduc to take a stand: "Mettez vos culottes!" ("Put your pants on!") Later in the halls of the assembly, she told journalists that Bolduc has "trivialized" the incident by depicting it as an isolated case. She demanded that Quebec ban the practice in schools. Bolduc's press aide, Yasmine Abdelfadel, pointed out that strip searches of students are allowed under the rules outlined in a provincial police guidebook for teachers, which was based on a 1998 Supreme Court case. The case involved a junior high school vice-principal who, in front of a plain clothes RCMP officer, searched two students suspected of selling marijuana on school property. The decision supported the right to search students on "reasonable grounds," but specified that it must be conducted in a "sensitive manner" and be "minimally intrusive." Angela Campbell, associate dean of graduate studies in law at McGill University, said telling a student to strip naked does not seem justified in the circumstances. "This is not a case of a person who was carrying a weapon or anything destructive and the person was asked to strip to completely nothing," she said. Schools have the right to search students' belongings, but the "search has to be reasonable and the search also has to be consistent with the idea of personal dignity," she said. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom