Veronia School District v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646 (1995), argued 28 Mar. 1995, decided 26 June 1995 by vote of 6 to 3; Scalia for the Court, Ginsburg concurring, O'Connor in dissent.
Veronia was yet another example of the ways in which the war on drugs raised seminal questions about the scope of individual liberty and the extent of the government's authority to limit that liberty in the name of reduced drug use. In this instance, a school district in a small (population three thousand) Oregon logging town, Veronia, decided on a new way to attack the problem of student drug use after a host of other approaches proved unsatisfactory. Faced with what it believed was rampant use by students, especially athletes, of drugs, the Veronia School Board in 1989 approved a program of random drug testing of all athletes. The school board reasoned that if drug use could be cut among the athletes and if they could become wholesome role models, then drug use as a whole would decline. At the start of each season, the new rule provided that school authorities would collect and analyze urine samples from middle and high school athletes to see if drugs were present. Throughout the remainder of the season, all athletes would be susceptible to testing at random intervals. The school board sent the samples to a private firm, whose analysis was valid 99.4 percent of the time. Any athlete who refused to take the test was prohibiting from participating in athletics for two years, while those who tested positive had to agree to drug counseling and a period of suspension from organized athletics.
James Acton was a twelve‐year‐old seventh grader in 1991 who wanted to try out for the football team. His parents, however, refused to sign a urinalysis consent form. There was never any suspicion that James, a model student, either had used or was using drugs. His parents objected to the policy as an interference with his and their privacy and, in essence, an unreasonable search of his body prohibited by the
Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. They insisted that the responsibility for drug testing rested with them, not the school board.
The Supreme Court and lower federal courts had previously dealt with issues of random drug testing for workers in areas vital to safety, such as railroads and national security. Never before had the High Court entertained questions of whether schools might engage in such testing and whether such testing might be random. After the federal district court in Oregon dismissed the Actons' suit, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit proceeded to reverse this decision and strike down the drug testing program as an unjustified violation of the privacy of students not suspected of drug use and an unreasonable search precluded by the Fourth Amendment. That Ninth Circuit opinion, however, conflicted with a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in 1988 that permitted random drug testing in the schools of Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The Supreme Court then stepped in to settle, for the first time, the constitutional law of drug testing in schools.
The justices gave a clear victory to the supporters of such testing. Justice Antonin
>Scalia's opinion for the Court affirmed the school district's policy as a “reasonable and hence constitutional” practice on three grounds (p. 680). First, Scalia found that students generally and student athletes in particular had lower expectations of privacy in communal locker rooms and rest rooms. In any case, the Court had already settled the matter that school officials could exercise “a degree of supervision and control that could not be exercised over free adults” (p. 663). Second, because the samples were taken in relative privacy and with a high level of confidence in the laboratory testing, there could be no concerns about the school's actions being overly obtrusive. Third, and perhaps most important, Scalia concluded that the school board ha identified an important interest in attacking drug use in the schools and that its program, of making sure that important leaders on campus were drug‐free, was likely to be effective. The school system did not, in Scalia's eyes, have to fulfill the traditional Fourth Amendment requirement of individualized suspicion before the government could act to conduct a search, since the state had identified a compelling state interest and students were not, in the end, accorded the same rights as were adults under the Fourth Amendment.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent actually supported the idea of random drug testing, but it took strong exception to Scalia's willingness to set aside the traditional requirement of individualized suspicion. According to O'Connor, the actions of the Veronia School Board amounted to a mass, suspicionless search that was, on its face, unreasonable. What would have been reasonable? According to O'Connor, it would have been “far more reasonable” for school officials to limit drug testing to those students who were disciplinary problems. Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg argued in her concurring opinion that the decision applied only to student athletes, but none of the other members of the Court joined her in drawing that distinction.
The Court essentially found that the importance of the school's interest in deterring drug use by students outweighed the students' limited privacy rights. Civil libertarians condemned the decision for making students second‐class citizens and sacrificing individual rights at the altar of the drug war. Proponents, including the administration of Bill Clinton, hailed the decision as another way of combating drug use among America's young people.
Kermit L. Hall
