In securing Juan C.'s rights, the judges disregarded a much larger issue.
Just last week, a 16-year-old student in a Georgia school shot and killed a teacher who was standing at the door of his classroom. According to one newspaper account, the teacher was hit when the student drew his gun after being accidentally jostled by another student. Officials caught the kid and sent the other students home, and the next day they brought in grief counselors. Terrible though it is, the shooting of students or teachers in school is now such a common occurrence that there is a routine for attempting to deal with it. Not that any amount of counseling will bring the teacher back to life or make these students and teachers feel safe again. They now know, beyond any doubt, that they could be killed tomorrow or next week by a student who sneaked a gun into school.
This is the context that the New York State appellate court judges should have had in mind when they recently overthrew the suspension of Juan C., a former New York City high school student, for bringing a gun to school. Here's the story. In 1992, 15-year-old Juan C. was seized by a security aide as he entered William Howard Taft High School. Taft is a tough place, and at the time it had a long-standing history of violence. The aide said he saw something that looked like the handle of a gun in the pocket of the student's leather jacket.
Juan C. attempted to run away, but the aide reached into his pocket and found a loaded semi-automatic weapon. Juan C. was arrested but quickly acquitted when the judge ruled the search illegal because, he said, the aide could not have seen the outline of the gun, and the search therefore violated Juan C.'s Fourth Amendment rights. Nevertheless, the school district decided to go on with an administrative hearing, and Juan was suspended for a year. He challenged the suspension, and a lower court denied the challenge, but last month, the appellate court reversed the earlier finding. Juan C. had long since served his suspension -- and, in any case, he was nowhere to be found. However, the court ordered that all mention of the disciplinary action be expunged from his record.
The general response to this decision was outrage -- and rightfully so. The public if often angered and dismayed at seeing drug dealers who are caught with large quantities of drugs go free because the police have violated their Fourth Amendment rights by searching them without a search warrant or adequate evidence. But even if you are a strong supporter of the exclusionary rule, as it is called, the situation in the schools is surely different from what it is on the streets. And the standard for what constitutes a reasonable basis for searching someone in school should be far more relaxed.
Going to school is not the same as going to a public park or a shopping mall; it is not voluntary. Unless they are being home-schooled, students are legally obliged to come to school, and schools are responsible for the safety and well-being of the students while they are there. The court was very solicitous about Juan C. 's right not to be searched, but in securing his rights the judges disregarded a much larger issue -- the safety of all the rest of the students.
One of the arguments for disallowing the search is to deter the security aide and others like him from doing something similar in the future. Probably it will. Security aides will be unlikely to search students if there is any possibility that the search will be illegal. And what will that mean? The number of guns will increase, making the schools still more unsafe. Some kids will bring guns because they'll know the likelihood of getting caught is slim, and other kids will bring them because they'll want to protect themselves. The guards will be deterred, all right, but what about kids like Juan C.? Talk about tunnel vision!
Year after year, public opinion polls show that parents put safety at or near the top of their list of worries about the public schools. And they are right to worry. It is up to public officials and unions and other groups that care about public education not just to roll over on this one. We must join together and explore the arguments that will lead to the overturning of this disastrous decision when the New York City school board appeals it to the state's highest court.
There's a good chance this can be done. The U.S. Supreme Court has already agreed to a relaxed application of the Fourth Amendment in schools in a couple of drug-related cases, one related to the search of student lockers and another to drug testing for students who want to play sports. If we let the case pass, the number of kids bringing guns to school will mount. It doesn't take any crystal ball to see what that will mean.