Opinion ID: 2219252
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Nature and Immediacy of School's Concerns and Efficacy of Search Policy in Meeting Them.

Text: The education of the students of the State of Iowa is a profound responsibility vested, ultimately, in the capable hands of local teachers, administrators, and school boards. What may be a daunting task to begin with is only made more difficult by the presence of various distractions ranging from excessive trash and missing supplies topotentiallymore troublesome items, such as controlled substances or weapons. What was observed by the Court in T.L.O. nearly twenty years ago remains trueif not truertoday: Maintaining order in the classroom has never been easy, but in recent years, school disorder has often taken particularly ugly forms: drug use and violent crime in the schools have become major social problems. See id. at 339, 105 S.Ct. at 741, 83 L.Ed.2d at 733. These developments serve as the backdrop against which the conduct of school officials must be considered, especially as it relates to their duty to educate students while also protecting them from numerous threats to that mission. See id. (Against the child's interest in privacy must be set the substantial interest of teachers and administrators in maintaining discipline in the classroom and on school grounds.). The principal of the school testified that the annual winter break locker cleanout was conducted by the school to prevent violations of both school rules related to the accumulation of trash and school supplies and the sharing of lockers and the law related to possession of controlled substances and weapons. School officials were aware that students tended to accumulate excessive trash and supplies in their lockers and sometimes shared the lockers against school policy. Moreover, they knew that if controlled substances or weapons were present in the school, either type of item would present a threat to the school environment that they were responsible for maintaining. To counteract the problems caused by these items, the school presented reasonable notice to the student body and attempted to check the lockers with student assistance. Some students, including Jones, did not follow this procedure and left the school with little choice of methods by which it could carry out what it considered to be a legitimate method by which school rules could be maintained. Although the school did not have individualized suspicion of rule or law violations before the locker cleanout operation, constitutional search and seizure provisions include no irreducible requirement that such suspicion exist. See Earls, 536 U.S. at 829, 122 S.Ct. at 2564, 153 L.Ed.2d at 744 (citation omitted); Acton, 515 U.S. at 653, 115 S.Ct. at 2391, 132 L.Ed.2d at 574-75 (citing T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 342 n. 8, 105 S.Ct. at 743 n. 8, 83 L.Ed.2d at 735 n. 8). Moreover, it would be contrary to the mission of our educational system to force schools to wait for problems to grow worse before allowing steps to be taken to prevent those problems. See Earls, 536 U.S. at 835-36, 122 S.Ct. at 2568, 153 L.Ed.2d at 748. Given the public school context in which this controversy arose and the present realities of public education, we conclude that the search conducted by school officials was proper.