Opinion ID: 853224
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Role Model Theory

Text: 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.