Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 27, 1995 TAG: 9506270071
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
By a 6-3 vote, the court upheld an Oregon school district's rule requiring mandatory random urine screening for any student who wants to play a team sport, even when officials have no basis to believe that a particular athlete uses drugs.
As a policy idea, drug testing of athletes has gained popularity since the 1986 death, from a cocaine overdose, of Len Bias, a basketball star at the University of Maryland.
Monday's ruling seems likely to have its strongest effect on millions of athletes among the nation's public-school children. But depending on how lower-court judges interpret the decision, school officials might wind up with permission to order drug screening of many more students to deal with a perceived drug problem.
One justice voting in the majority, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, insisted that the ruling applied only to students who want to join team sports. But her vote was not necessary to the outcome, and no other justice signed on to her separate opinion. The five others in the majority embraced a far more sweeping opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia.
The decision, the first the court had issued in six years on the legality of drug testing, broke new ground. Never before had the court authorized official intrusion into bodily privacy, without any suspicion, if the intrusion was not justified by work-related duties or public safety. Random tests for police, firefighters, airline and railroad crews, and for prison inmates, have become common.
The ruling will not affect state colleges and universities. The court stressed that it was dealing only with children, not adults, and with students who are required to go to school and remain under control of administrators, not those who attend college voluntarily and come and go as they please.
Gwendolyn H. Gregory, deputy general counsel of the National School Boards Association, noted that there is not much drug testing in public schools now, and the few court decisions that have emerged usually have barred such tests.
But the new decision, she said, gives school officials ``a policy discretion that had been problematic before.'' Factors likely to determine how many school districts use the new decision to justify drug-testing programs, Gregory said, are the reaction of local communities and the high cost of a testing program.
Of the three main factors Scalia cited to justify the mandatory random testing at issue, two seem to justify school drug tests that go beyond student athletes: First, the students involved are minors; and, second, they are required to attend school and while there are under administrators' control as temporary stand-ins for the parents.
The third factor cited seems to support tests only for athletes: the nature of school athletics. Students involved volunteer to join teams, are routinely subject to locker-room conditions that provide little privacy, are often required to take physical exams not required of other students, are subject to injury especially if they are using drugs, and act frequently as ``role models'' for other students.
by CNB