SPOKANE, WA -- In response to a
threatened lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington and the
Center for Justice, the Nine Mile Falls School District has stopped using
drug-sniffing dogs to search its middle and high school students.
"We are pleased that the district has chosen to respect its
students," said Julya Hampton, the ACLU of Washington's Legal Program Director.
"The district's blanket use of drug-sniffing dogs treats every student as a
suspect, without suspicion or evidence that they have done anything
wrong."
Many parents and students were upset when the
district, which is located north of Spokane in eastern Washington, began
bringing trained dogs on school grounds to sniff students' belongings for
contraband, without any suspicion of wrongdoing on the part of individual
students. The ACLU and the Center for Justice, a local nonprofit that provides
free legal services, were poised to file a lawsuit on behalf of a student and
parent when they received a letter on March 27 in which the school district
stated that it will place a moratorium on future drug dog searches until a state
or federal court determines their lawfulness.
"We support the Nine
Mile Falls District in their efforts to keep their schools drug-free. However,
the use of drug-sniffing dogs is a costly and ineffective tool in this fight,"
said John Sklut, a CFJ staff attorney. "It is important that any searches at
public schools be consistent with constitutional protections so that our
students learn about the Constitution both in practice and in
theory."
The school district hired Interquest Detection Canines in
January 2004 to use trained dogs to search for contraband at its schools. The
company agreed to search the high school and middle school at least four times a
year each, looking for illegal, prescription or over-the-counter drugs, alcohol
and tobacco. Asking dogs to identify so many different and unrelated items leads
to a very low accuracy rate according to the ACLU. Records from the first
rounds of drug-sniffing dogs at the Nine Mile Falls district showed that the
dogs were incorrect more than 85 percent of the times that they "alerted" to a
substance.
While the searches were being conducted, school
administrators announced that the school was on a "level one lockdown," and that
all students were to sit quietly at their desks. Repeated calls for lockdowns
have desensitized the students, who no longer take the notices seriously. This
was especially dangerous in December 2004, when a student entered the foyer of
Lakeside High School with a gun and shot himself to death. Many students at the
time ignored the announcement of a school lockdown, since it had been misused
for random classroom searches, the ACLU said.
The planned lawsuit
would have challenged suspicionless searches as a violation of the "privacy
clause" of the Washington Constitution, which provides that "No person shall be
disturbed in his private affairs, or his home invaded, without authority of
law." In Kuehn v. Renton School District, an ACLU case, the Washington Supreme
Court in 1985 ruled that it is unconstitutional for public schools to search a
student without individualized suspicion that he or she is breaking a law or
school rule. In that case, school officials had sought to search a student's
luggage prior to a school band trip.
Attorneys handling this matter
are ACLU staff attorney Aaron Caplan and Center for Justice staff attorney John
Sklut. The Center for Justice is a nonprofit law firm based in Spokane
dedicated to providing services for those who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. It
handles cases concerning civil rights, democracy/government and institutional
accountability and regional ecosystem health.