Opinion ID: 853224
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Overcoming the Linkes' Privacy Interests

Text: 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.