Schools may not strip search students for drugs based on an unverified tip, a federal appeals court ruled today.
Overturning two other rulings, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a middle school assistant principal in Arizona violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old honor student by ordering her to be strip searched under the belief that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen.
The 6-5 ruling by the San Francisco-based court reinstated a lawsuit that a divided three-judge circuit panel threw out last year. The lawsuit was brought by the parents of Savana Redding, who was an eighth grader at Stafford Middle School in southeastern Arizona when the assistant principal ordered her out of math class and into his office to investigate whether she had violated a school policy that prohibited students from bringing even over-the-counter medication to school.
School officials had found another student with Redding’s school planner and some ibuprofen pills. That “frightened” student claimed Redding had given her the pills, the court said. Redding denied it. After a search of her pockets and backpack yielded nothing incriminatory, Kerry Wilson, the assistant principal, ordered his administrative assistant and a school nurse to force her to disrobe.
“The officials had Savana peel off each layer of clothing in turn,” wrote Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw for the majority.
The girl stood in her bra and underpants while the two, female school officials searched her clothes. Then she was ordered to partially remove her bra, exposing her breasts, and finally told to shake out the crotch of her underpants.
“Hiding her head so that the adults could not see that she was about to cry, Savana complied and pulled out her underwear, revealing her pelvic area,” Wardlaw wrote. “No ibuprofen was found.”
The majority said the search was unjustified because school officials made no attempt to corroborate the claim by the “cornered” student who was “seeking to shift blame from herself” when she identified Savana as the source of the medicine. Forcing Savana to disrobe also was a “disproportionately extreme measure,” the majority said.
“Common sense informs us that directing a 13-year-old girl to remove her clothes, partially revealing her breasts and pelvic area, for allegedly possessing ibuprofen, an infraction that poses an imminent danger to no one, and which could have been handled by keeping her in the principal’s office until a parent arrived or simply sending her home, was excessively intrusive,” Wardlaw wrote.
The court cited arguments by the National Association of Social Workers that strip searches of children “can result in serious emotional damage, including the development of, or increase in, oppositional behavior.”
The ruling said that Wilson, the assistant principal, was liable for monetary damages, but his aide and the school nurse were not because they were acting under his orders.
In his dissent, Judge Ronald Gould argued that all school officials had governmental immunity because the law was not clear at the time of the search.
In another dissent, Judge Michael Daly Hawkins said that the search was constitutional.
“School officials deserve the greatest latitude when responding to behavior that threatens the health and safety of students or teachers. …” Hawkins wrote. “When school officials reasonably believe that a student is carrying a weapon or harmful drugs, it will rarely be unreasonable for them to do what they can to neutralize the danger.”
Although ibuprofen is mild, “that does not mean it is never harmful,” Hawkins wrote.
The ruling affects nine states, which are under the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction.
Adam Wolf, a lawyer with the ACLU Foundation, which helped represent Savana, said the ruling “sends a clear message to school administrators nationwide that they need to respect certain student privacy and that they can’t take the drastic step of strip searching a student based on one uncorroborated tip.”
Lawyers for the school district were not available for comment.
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