Opinion ID: 853224
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Applying the Special Needs Analysis to NSC's Program

Text: I agree with the majority that the relevant inquiry under Article I, Section 11 of the Indiana Constitution is whether, given the totality of the circumstances, the searches conducted by NSC are reasonable. Brown v. State, 653 N.E.2d 77, 79-80 (Ind.1995). In this respect, the Indiana Constitution is very similar, if not identical, to the formulation adopted for the Fourth Amendment in Vernonia: reasonableness under all the circumstances. 515 U.S. at 652, 115 S.Ct. 2386 ([T]he ultimate measure of the constitutionality of a governmental search is `reasonableness.'). The majority concludes that the appropriate circumstances to examine are the same as those balanced by the Court in Vernonia: the nature of the privacy interest; the character of the intrusion; and the nature and immediacy of the governmental concern. So far, so good. But, in applying the reasoning of Vernonia in light of Chandler, I arrive at a different conclusion from the majority's.
The majority finds the Linkes' privacy interests of minimal weight based on three propositions: (1) students' privacy interests are less than those of adults; (2) students consent to the searches; and (3) the tested students are held out by NSC as role models. I think the first is true only to a limited extent, and the other two are not true at all.
The majority contends that the Linkes' privacy interests deserve lesser protection than Article I, Section 11 would normally demand because schools are allowed a degree of supervision and control that could not be exercised over free adults. I agree that Indiana law generally supports that view. However, a school's degree of supervision is not without its limits. The majority relies on the notion that schools stand in the relation of parents and guardians to its students in matters of conduct and discipline. This may justify the imposition of drug testing when matters of conduct and discipline are at issue. But it does not carry equal weight when suspicionless searches are conducted as a matter of routine. Indeed, in T.L.O., the United States Supreme Court cautioned against such a laissez-faire view of the role of school officials who conduct searches: If school authorities are state actors for purposes of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression and due process, it is difficult to understand why they should be deemed to be exercising parental rather than public authority when conducting searches of their students. More generally, the Court has recognized that the concept of parental delegation as a source of school authority is not entirely consonant with compulsory education laws. Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651, 662 [97 S.Ct. 1401, 51 L.Ed.2d 711] (1977). Today's public school officials do not merely exercise authority voluntarily conferred on them by individual parents; rather, they act in furtherance of publicly mandated educational and disciplinary policies.... In carrying out searches and other disciplinary functions pursuant to such policies, school officials act as representatives of the State, not merely as surrogates for the parents.... 469 U.S. at 336, 105 S.Ct. 733. It is also noteworthy that, although the education of Indiana's students is one of the most highly regulated enterprises of our state government, nowhere in the specifically enumerated powers and duties of this state's school corporations has the legislature given explicit authority for random drug testing of students. [3]
Among the categories of students affected by the NSC program are those enrolled in some for-credit courses whose activities take place off school premises. The majority concludes that, because alternative for-credit assignments are available to take the place of the portion of the course that triggers the testing requirement, the decision whether to submit to testing is voluntary. But the effects of refusing to submit to drug testing in those courses may be quite harsh. Consider, for example, a member of the choir who hopes to enter a performing arts program in college. He or she is permitted, as the majority points out, to participate in alternative for-credit assignments, but is denied the opportunity to perform in public with the rest of the chorus. When the time comes to apply to the performing arts program, if that student refuses to participate in the voluntary program, he or she may be able to document a high grade in choir, but has a gaping void in performance experience. The majority identifies one set of for-credit coursework as compulsory regular classes, and describes participation in everything else voluntary. But the aspiring vocalist's appearance in public concerts is no more a voluntary activity than the future math major's electing calculus, when algebra will satisfy the high school diploma requirements. Cf. Trinidad Sch. Dist. No. 1 v. Lopez, 963 P.2d 1095, 1109 (Colo.1998) (extra-curricular activities are a vital adjunct to the educational experience). That the student receives academic credit from the alternative program does not change the fact that the student is essentially given a different course from the one provided his or her peers, because of a voluntary decision not to take a drug test. I agree that participation in certain extra-curricular activities may open the door to some fashion of drug testing. Athletics have traditionally been the primary target of such programs. See, e.g., Vernonia (student-athletes subject to testing because they were the leaders of the drug culture and instigators of severe discipline problems). There may well be some basis for drug testing as a safety measure in activities accompanied by significant physical stress. I find far less tenable the notion that participation in non-athletic extracurriculars also opens the door to such an intrusive practice. There is nothing peculiar about National Honor Society, for instance, that suggests that its members must subject themselves, by virtue of their participation ... to regulations that further reduce their expectation of privacy. Joy v. Penn-Harris-Madison Sch. Corp., 212 F.3d 1052, 1063 (7th Cir.2000). As more fully developed in Part II.C, I believe that in order to be reasonable under all the circumstances, the scope of the testing program must bear some relation to the identified issue the program is meant to address. The NSC plan fails that test.
The majority concedes that the record does not address whether their peers view students participating in the tested activities as role models, but finds persuasive the fact that NSC holds the affected students out as such. This writer is further removed from high school than his colleagues. But even a casual reviewer of pop culture must view with extreme skepticism the undocumented claim that participants in this broad list of activities are all, or even predominantly, viewed by their peers as role models. [4] In any event, whether the affected party is or is not held out as a role model is not adequate to justify NSC's program on a special needs basis. As the U.S. Supreme Court put it, [I]f a need of the `set a good example' genre were sufficient to overwhelm a Fourth Amendment objection, then the care this Court took to explain why the needs in Skinner, Von Raab, and Vernonia ranked as `special' wasted many words in entirely unnecessary, perhaps even misleading, elaborations. Chandler, 520 U.S. at 322, 117 S.Ct. 1295. Rather than supporting the need for testing, the fact that NSC advances its role model theory underscores the paucity of evidence that testing of the affected students has any relation to NSC's drug problem.

I disagree with the majority to the extent it suggests that a search is less intrusive if conducted by school officials, rather than police. I am aware of no authority suggesting that Article I, Section 11 applies more stringently to police activity than that of other government agencies. Nor does the text of Article I, Section 11 support such a result. The majority emphasizes the words police and law enforcement in the cited portions of Baldwin v. Reagan, 715 N.E.2d 332 (Ind.1999), Brown, 653 N.E.2d 77 (Ind.1995), and Moran v. State, 644 N.E.2d 536 (Ind.1994) to suggest that Article I, Section 11 carries greater weight in those situations than when school officials' conduct is at issue. Those cases referred to police activity because the seizures in those cases were conducted by police officers. There is nothing in those cases to suggest a different result if the seizure were conducted by a different arm of government. Indeed, other cases frequently refer to the constraint on searches by government in general, not just by the police. See Moran, 644 N.E.2d at 540 (The protection afforded [by Article I, Section 11] is against official and not private acts.); Hutchinson v. State, 477 N.E.2d 850, 853 (Ind.1985) (The constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures provide protection from such acts by the government.); Torres v. State, 442 N.E.2d 1021, 1023 (Ind.1982) (same); cf. New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 335, 105 S.Ct. 733 ([T]his Court has never limited the [Fourth] Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures to operations conducted by the police.). I agree with the majority that, in some cases, suspicionless searches conducted by schools have been upheld under circumstances that would preclude a search by law enforcement. But it is not the identity of the searching government agents that makes this so. It is the nature of the intrusion and the reasons justifying it. That a school, rather than the police, is charged with the unreasonable conduct is not an automatic invitation to apply the mandate of Article I, Section 11 with less force.
I do not place much stock in the fact that the results of NSC's drug tests are not routinely volunteered to law enforcement authorities. Regardless of the stated purpose of the testing, I do not agree with the majority that [a] preventative or rehabilitative search is inherent to a school corporation's function. Indeed, I find no support for such a notion. A school corporation's inherent function is to educate, not to monitor an arbitrarily defined category of students for the use of drugs, alcohol or nicotine, or compliance with other laws. The testing conducted in Vernonia was necessary to that school's inherent educational function because the education of the students was severely affected by the immediate crisis prompted by the sharp rise in students' use of unlawful drugs. Chandler, 520 U.S. at 319, 117 S.Ct. 1295. This crisis included severe disruption of classroom activities. In any case, NSC's program is not the method of preserving a proper educational environment envisioned by T.L.O., on which the majority relies. T.L.O. dealt with smoking in the school and the ability of teachers and principals to respond swiftly to address conduct in the educational environment without adhering to the formal requirements of the Fourth Amendment. These situations certainly may require immediate action. But that is not the case presented by NSC. Nor does NSC argue that its students have run amok, as was the case in Vernonia. Finally, there is no claim that the testing of these groups of students, distinct from the population as a whole, has any relation to NSC's perceived drug problem. The Tenth Circuit, in Earls v. Tecumseh Pub. Sch. Dist. No. 92, 242 F.3d 1264 (10th Cir.2001), cert. granted, ___ U.S. ___, 122 S.Ct. 509, 151 L.Ed.2d 418 (Nov. 8, 2001), invalidated a drug testing program for that reason. The majority distinguishes Earls based on differences between its policy and NSC's. But Earls turned not on the nature of the school district's policy, but on the classification of students subjected to the searches. The Tenth Circuit saw little efficacy in a drug testing policy which tests students among whom there is no measurable drug problem. 242 F.3d at 1277. Finally, the preventative nature of NSC's program proves too much. If it is a legitimate objective, it gives reason for NSC to test every student. Willis v. Anderson Cmty. Sch. Corp., 158 F.3d 415, 422 (7th Cir.1998), cert. denied, 526 U.S. 1019, 119 S.Ct. 1254, 143 L.Ed.2d 351 (1999) (If [deterrence] were the only relevant consideration, Vernonia might as well have sanctioned blanket testing of all children in public schools. And this it did not do.). Of course, such testing is not permissible. Cf. Joy, 212 F.3d at 1067 ([T]he case has yet to be made that a urine sample can be the `tuition' at a public school.). As T.L.O. reminded us: [T]he reasonableness standard should ensure that the interests of students will be invaded no more than is necessary to achieve the legitimate end of preserving order in the schools. The rights of NSC's students or at least the ones NSC has chosen to testshould be subject to no more of an intrusion than necessary to achieve NSC's interest in preserving order in its schools. In my view, the issue is not, as the majority's reasoning suggests, whether NSC's policy is comparable to those imposed at other schools and documented in other cases. Rather it is whether NSC's program, and its suspicionless testing of broad categories of students, is justified at all. It is incumbent upon NSC to prove this, and its failure to do so leaves its program well short of complying with Article I, Section 11.

The final factor in the special needs balance is the nature and immediacy of NSC's concern and the efficacy of its testing program in addressing it. Vernonia, 515 U.S. at 660, 115 S.Ct. 2386. The majority's treatment of Vernonia suggests that the phrase special need means nothing more than that a school may identify a drug problem and thereafter impose random drug testing on any student engaged in an extra- or co-curricular activity. I do not read Vernonia that broadly. NSC carries the burden of proving why its searches fall within the special needs doctrine, as applied in Vernonia, and later clarified in Chandler. In my view, it fails to establish the concrete danger to which its program responds, orassuming the presence of a concrete dangerthat the program in its present form is tailored to address it. In Chandler, the United States Supreme Court explained that the proffered special need for drug testing must be substantialimportant enough to override the individual's acknowledged privacy interest, sufficiently vital to suppress the Fourth Amendment's normal requirement of individualized suspicion. 520 U.S. at 318, 117 S.Ct. 1295. To invoke the special needs doctrine, the proponent of such a testing program must demonstrate a concrete danger. Id. at 319, 117 S.Ct. 1295. In Vernonia, the concrete danger with regard to the school's student athletes was evident and described as a state of rebellion. 515 U.S. at 662-63, 115 S.Ct. 2386. A variety of problems in the school environment were cited. NSC argues that the survey results and the deaths of two students in a ten-year period justify the program it has put into place. But neither of these circumstances involved the classroom disruption cited in Vernonia, and NSC's superintendent could not point to any increase in discipline problems attributable to substance abuse. It may not take an epidemic before a school justifiably institutes a drug testing program. But it must take more than the evidence presented by NSC. If not, Article I, Section 11 may fairly be said to provide little, if any, protection to Indiana's students. The concerns cited by NSC are of course significant. But even if they rose to the level sufficient to support some testing program, NSC's program is not justified by its evidence. In Joy, the Seventh Circuit addressed an Indiana school's testing policy similar to NSC's. Although the particulars of the policy are unimportant to the present case, the Seventh Circuit's analysis is instructive. [5] The court assessed the nature of the government's interest, in part, by examining whether a correlation existed between the defined test population and the abuse. NSC's evidence of substance abuse in its schools is a survey given to students in grades seven through ten. However the results do not suggest a correlation between the percentage of students claiming to have used a given substance and those students who participate in an activity covered by NSC's testing program. The survey cited by NSC may indeed demonstrate a ... `correlation' between student drug use and a need to test. What it does not do is demonstrate a correlation between drug use among the general student population and a need to test the students who are subject to the program. Cf. id. at 685, 115 S.Ct. 2386 (O'Connor, J., dissenting) (criticizing the school district's decision to test student athletes as a choice that appears to have been driven more by a belief in what would pass constitutional muster ... than by a belief in what was required to meet the District's principal disciplinary concern.). NSC cites Joy and Vernonia in support of its claim that [u]nder a reasonableness standard the federal courts have found that findings like this do in fact provide a basis for testing. The majority appears to accept this argument. I think this misses the point of Joy and Vernonia. Here, as in Joy, NSC has not proven, or even attempted to prove, that a correlation exists between drug use and those who engage in extracurricular activities or drug use and those who drive to school. 212 F.3d at 1064. Thus, NSC's program amounts to dividing the students into broad categories and drug testing on a category-by-category basis, which allows for drug testing for all but the most uninvolved and isolated students. Id. (citing Willis, 158 F.3d at 423). Willis appropriately described such a program as one insidious means toward blanket testing. 158 F.3d at 423.
One driving force in the United States Supreme Court's opinion in Vernonia was the Court's conclusion that a program based on individualized suspicion would entail substantial difficultiesif it [were] indeed practicable at all in order to handle the immediate crisis present in the Vernonia school district. As explained in Part II.C.1, NSC does not proffer evidence of a concrete danger of an immediate nature as to the students it tests. Further, as the majority points out, NSC's program not only entails random testing of the selected groups of students, but also provides that [s]tudents may also be entered into the testing program at the request of their parent ... when a student shows signs of drug use that provides reasonable suspicion to search a student. (emphasis added). By its own terms, NSC's policy purports to have the ability to determine when a reasonable suspicion is present for a given student. I recognize and agree that suspicion-based searches can lead to abuses if the grounds for suspicion are not sufficiently articulable. As noted in State v. Gerschoffer, a scheme of random searches may be less subject to abuse in the form of profiling or arbitrary enforcement than one that requires reasonable suspicion. 763 N.E.2d 960 (Ind.2002) (citing Akhil Reed Amar, Fourth Amendment First Principles, 107 Harv. L.Rev. 757, 809 (1994)). Nevertheless, the broader the net cast, and the weaker the case for any program at all, the less persuasive this consideration becomes. Thus airport searches of everyone or of randomly selected passengers may be very reasonable under current circumstances. But NSC's program subjects nearly eighty percent of its middle and high school students to random tests, based on this very tenuous claim of a concrete danger. In Willis, 158 F.3d at 421, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals stated, Under the Vernonia formulation, courts consider the feasibility of a suspicion-based search when assessing the efficacy of the government's policy. The testing program in Willis required students who were suspended for three or more days to submit to urinalysis upon their return. Willis was suspended for fighting, but refused to undergo testing upon his return. The Anderson policy, like NSC's policy, was implemented to help identify and intervene with those students who are using drugs as soon as possible and to involve the parents immediately. Id. at 417. The Seventh Circuit, holding the program violated the Fourth Amendment, found it significant that the Corporation has not demonstrated that a suspicion-based system would be unsuitable, in fact would not be highly suitable. Id. at 424-25. The court noted: As a practical matter, it may be that when a suspicion-based search is workable, the needs of the government will never be strong enough to outweigh the privacy interests of the individual. Or, stated slightly differently, perhaps if a suspicion-based search is feasible, the government will have failed to show a special need that is important enough to override the individual's acknowledged privacy interest, sufficiently vital to suppress the Fourth Amendment's normal requirement of individualized suspicion. Id. at 421 (quoting Chandler, 520 U.S. at 318, 117 S.Ct. 1295). Whether a suspicion-based system is feasible is just one factor in our totality of the circumstances analysis, but I believeas Willis illustratesit is a significant one in the balance of whether the system is reasonable. Given the fact that NSC's own policy contemplates suspicion-based testing for some students, what is practicable for some is practicable for all.