*The HONORABLE THOMAS M. REAVLEY, United States Circuit Judge

for the Fifth Circuit, sitting by designation.

___________

No. 95-2276

___________

Cleoria Thompson, as next *

friend of Ramone Lea, a minor, *

*

*

Plaintiff - Appellee, *

*

v. *

*

Carthage School District; *

Randy King, individually and in * Appeal from the United States

his capacity as Superintendent * District Court for the

of Schools; Randy Harris, Bruce * Eastern District of Arkansas.

McCracken, Curtis Rushing, Gail *

Toney, individually and in *

their official capacity as *

Members of the Board of *

Education; Norma Bartel, Ralph *

Malone, individually and in *

their capacity as employees of *

the Carthage School District, *

*

Defendants - Appellants. *

___________

 Submitted: January 11, 1996

 Filed: June 28, 1996

___________

Before LOKEN, REAVLEY, and HANSEN, Circuit Judges. *

___________

LOKEN, Circuit Judge.

 Ramone Lea was expelled from Carthage High School after school

officials found crack cocaine in his coat pocket while looking for guns and

knives reported to be on school grounds. The district court awarded

$10,000 in § 1983 damages for "wrongful expulsion" because the search had

violated Lea's Fourth Amendment
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rights. The Carthage School District, four members of its Board of

Education, the school Superintendent, and the educators who performed the

search appeal. Concluding that the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule does

not apply to school disciplinary hearings, and that the search was

constitutionally reasonable, we reverse.

I. 

Carthage is a small, rural school district in which all grades are

housed at one location. Total enrollment is about 225; 90 to 100 students

attend the High School. On the morning of October 26, 1993, a school bus

driver told Norma Bartel, the High School principal, that there were fresh

cuts on seats of her bus. Concerned that a knife or other cutting weapon

was on the school grounds, Bartel concluded that all male students in

grades six to twelve should be searched. After the search began, students

told Bartel that there was a gun at the school that morning.

Bartel and science teacher Ralph Malone conducted the search by

bringing each class of students to Malone's classroom. The students were

told to remove their jackets, shoes, and socks, empty their pockets, and

place these items on large tables in the science room. Bartel and Malone

then checked the students for concealed weapons with a metal detector.

Malone would pat down a student if the metal detector sounded, as it often

did because of the metal brads on the students' blue jeans. Malone and

Bartel also patted the students' coats and removed any objects they could

feel in the coat pockets. They completed the search before Superintendent

Randy King arrived at 9:30 that morning.

Lea was a ninth grade student at the time of the search. Neither

Bartel nor Malone had reason to suspect that Lea had cut the school bus

seats or had brought a weapon to school that morning. Lea's class was one

of the last to be searched in the science room. Malone searched Lea's coat

pocket and found a used
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book of matches, a match box, and a cigarette package. Considering these

items to be contraband, Malone showed them to Bartel, and she brought them

to her office. Bartel found only cereal in the cigarette package but

discovered "a white substance" in the match box. She took the match box

to King, who turned it over to a deputy sheriff. A test revealed that the

white substance was crack cocaine. After a hearing, Lea was expelled for

the remainder of the school year. 

Lea and his guardian, Cleoria Thompson, commenced this § 1983 action,

alleging that the search and expulsion violated Lea's Fourth Amendment

rights, and that the expulsion hearing denied him due process. The parties

submitted the case on depositions and affidavits. The district court held

that the expulsion proceeding comported with due process, but that Lea's

expulsion was wrongful because the search had violated his Fourth Amendment

rights. The school officials had no "individualized, particularized

suspicion" that Lea was carrying a weapon or other contraband, and "there

was no adequate basis in the evidence to justify the initial decision to

search all 6-12 grade boys." In addition, the court reasoned, Bartel and

Malone seized the match box after they knew that Lea did not possess a

knife or gun. The court awarded Lea $10,000 in compensatory damages

against defendants Bartel, Malone, King, and the school board members who

voted for expulsion. It awarded Lea a reasonable attorney's fee, granted

a declaratory judgment that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated, but

declined to issue an injunction. This appeal followed.

II. 

At the outset, we confront an issue ignored by the parties and the

district court -- whether the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule applies

in school disciplinary proceedings. At oral argument, we invited counsel

to submit supplemental briefs addressing this issue, but neither side did

so. The issue is critical because the
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district court awarded substantial damages for wrongful expulsion, based

entirely on the proposition that Lea could not be expelled for possessing

crack cocaine discovered during an illegal search. 

The judicially-created exclusionary rule precludes admission of

unlawfully seized evidence in criminal trials. "In the complex and

turbulent history of the rule, the Court never has applied it to exclude

evidence from a civil proceeding, federal or state." United States v.

Janis, 428 U.S. 433, 447 (1976). In Janis, the Court held that the rule

does not apply in federal tax proceedings to bar evidence illegally seized

by state officials. In INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032 (1984), the

Court held that the rule does not apply in civil INS deportation hearings.

The Court's "framework" for deciding whether the exclusionary rule applies

in a particular civil proceeding is to analyze whether the likely benefit

of excluding illegally obtained evidence outweighs the societal costs of

exclusion. Id. at 1041.

The societal costs of applying the rule in school disciplinary

proceedings are very high. For example, the exclusionary rule might bar

a high school from expelling a student who confessed to killing a classmate

on campus if his confession was not preceded by Miranda warnings. We doubt

that any parent would compromise school safety in this fashion. To the

extent the exclusionary rule prevents the disciplining of students who

disrupt education or endanger other students, it frustrates the critical

governmental function of educating and protecting children. 

Moreover, "maintaining security and order in the schools requires a

certain degree of flexibility in school disciplinary procedures." New

Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 340 (1985). Application of the

exclusionary rule would require suppression hearing-like inquiries

inconsistent with the demands of school discipline, demands that led the

Court to impose very limited due
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process requirements in Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565, 583-84 (1975). 

The benefit of the exclusionary rule depends upon whether it would

effectively deter Fourth Amendment violations. In that regard, this case

is like Lopez-Mendoza in one important respect -- school officials both

conducted the search and imposed the student discipline. Knowing that

evidence they illegally seize will be excluded at any subsequent

disciplinary proceeding would likely have a strong deterrent effect. See

468 U.S. at 1042-43. 

But there are also important differences between school discipline

and the deportation proceeding at issue in Lopez-Mendoza. The dissenters

in that case argued for the exclusionary rule "[b]ecause INS agents are law

enforcement officials whose mission is closely analogous to that of police

officers and because civil deportation proceedings are to INS agents what

criminal trials are to police officers." 468 U.S. at 1053 (White, J.,

dissenting). School officials, on the other hand, are not law enforcement

officers. They do not have an adversarial relationship with students.

"Instead, there is a commonality of interests between teachers and their

pupils. The attitude of the typical teacher is one of personal

responsibility for the student's welfare as well as for his education."

T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 350 (Powell, J., concurring). Moreover, children's

legitimate expectations of privacy are somewhat limited at school.

Therefore, while the Fourth Amendment applies to searches by school

officials, its reasonableness standard, when applied to school searches,

"stops short of probable cause." T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 341. 

In these circumstances, we conclude that there is little need for the

exclusionary rule's likely deterrent effect. Indeed, we see some risk that

application of the rule would deter educators from undertaking disciplinary

proceedings that are needed to keep the schools safe and to control student

misbehavior. In any event, any deterrence benefit would not begin to

outweigh the high
 See James v. Unified Sch. Dist. No. 512, 899 F. Supp. 530,

1

533-34 (D. Kan. 1995); Morale v. Grigel, 422 F. Supp. 988, 999-1001

(D.N.H. 1976); Ekelund v. Secretary of Commerce, 418 F. Supp. 102,

106 (E.D.N.Y. 1976). Contra, Jones v. Latexo Indep. Sch. Dist.,

499 F. Supp. 223, 238-39 (E.D. Tex. 1980). 

 Like the Supreme Court in T.L.O., we do not consider whether 2

evidence illegally seized by school officials on school grounds is

admissible at a subsequent criminal trial or delinquency

proceeding. See 469 U.S. at 333 n.3.

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societal costs of imposing the rule. Therefore, like most district courts

that have published opinions applying Janis and Lopez-Mendoza, we conclude 1

that the exclusionary rule may not be applied to prevent school officials

from disciplining students based upon the fruits of a search conducted on

school grounds. Accordingly, Lea was not wrongfully expelled, and the

$10,000 damage award must be reversed. 

2

III. 

In concluding that the search violated Lea's Fourth Amendment rights,

the district court emphasized the fact that Bartel and Malone had no

individualized reason to suspect Lea of carrying a weapon. In T.L.O., 469

U.S. at 342 n.8, the Supreme Court had left open the issue whether

individualized suspicion is always required for school searches. However,

after the district court decided this case, the Supreme Court upheld random

drug testing of high school athletes despite the absence of individualized

suspicion in Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J v. Acton, 115 S. Ct. 2386 (1995). The

Court clarified that individualized suspicion is not always required for

school searches. It recognized that the drug testing at issue was

inherently intrusive. (Taking a urine sample and requiring disclosure of

health information is more intrusive than, for example, looking in a purse,

the search at issue in T.L.O.) But the Court concluded that this

significant privacy invasion was justified by the important government

interest in reducing drug abuse by student athletes. 115 S. Ct. at 2396.
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Vernonia impacts this case in one significant way -- it confirms that

the doctrine of qualified immunity bars any award of damages. The

individual defendants did not violate clearly established law when they

decided to search all the older male students for dangerous weapons

reported to be on the school grounds. See Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S.

635, 639-40 (1987). 

The district court rejected Lea's due process claim and denied him

injunctive relief. With a damage award now foreclosed by Vernonia and our

decision that there was no wrongful expulsion, the award of an attorney's

fee must also be reversed. See Farrar v. Hobby, 113 S. Ct. 566, 575

(1992). That ends the case, except for a difficult issue that has little

remaining practical significance -- whether the district court erred in

declaring that the search violated Lea's Fourth Amendment rights. 

The Fourth Amendment inquiry in school search cases is whether the

search was reasonable in all the circumstances. The inquiry focuses on

whether the search was justified at its inception, whether its scope was

reasonably related to the circumstances justifying a search, and the extent

of the privacy intrusion. See T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 341. In a school

setting, "the relevant question is whether the search is one that a

reasonable guardian and tutor might undertake." Vernonia, 115 S. Ct. at

2397. We review the reasonableness issue de novo. See United States v.

Brown, 51 F.3d 131, 132 (8th Cir. 1995). 

The district court concluded that the broad search for knives and

guns was not justified at its inception because the Carthage School

District was not facing a "serious, on-going, problem with such dangerous

instrumentalities." In our view, that analysis is inconsistent with

Vernonia. Principal Bartel had two independent reasons to suspect that one

or more weapons had been brought to school that morning. Though she had

no basis for suspecting any particular student, this was a risk to student

safety and school
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discipline that no "reasonable guardian and tutor" could ignore. Bartel's

response was to issue a sweeping, but minimally intrusive command,

"Children, take off your shoes and socks and empty your pockets." We

conclude that Bartel's decision to undertake this generalized but minimally

intrusive search for dangerous weapons was constitutionally reasonable.

See Cornfield v. Consolidated High Sch. Dist. No. 230, 991 F.2d 1316, 1320-

21 (7th Cir. 1993). 

The district court further concluded that the scope of the search was

not reasonably related to its original purpose because Lea's pockets were

searched after the metal detector had revealed that he did not possess a

gun or knife. But in a school setting, Fourth Amendment reasonableness

does not turn on "hairsplitting argumentation." T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 346

n.12. If Lea had emptied his own coat pocket, the cigarette package and

match box would have become contraband in plain view. It is not

constitutionally significant that teacher Malone emptied the pocket after

Lea put his jacket on the table. Moreover, once Bartel and Malone

reasonably decided to quickly search many children's pockets for dangerous

weapons, it is not realistic to require them to abort the search of a

particular child who does not appear to be in possession of such

contraband. 

To summarize, while we share the district court's concern over

excessive use of sweeping searches of school children's persons and

belongings, even in a minimally intrusive manner, we conclude that the

search undertaken in this case passes muster under T.L.O. and Vernonia.

The judgment of the district court is reversed and the case is remanded for

entry of judgment in favor of defendants.

A true copy.

Attest:

CLERK, U. S. COURT OF APPEALS, EIGHTH CIRCUIT.