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

Heading: NSC's Governmental Concern and Efficacy of its Program

Text: 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.