Congress Considering Strip Searching Students!

Anyone who could land a teaching or school administration job would be
able to molest students with impunity after accusing them of possessing
drugs. Then there are the police officers who benefited from the
veterans' hiring preference because of their experience as torturers and
rapists in Iraq. Does Congress mean to make all young female students
fair game for vaginal searches, or only those of minority races, languages
or religions?


---- Original Message ----


Congress Considering Strip Searching Students!

http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/091806stripsearch.cfm
Congress Considering Strip Searching Students
September 18, 2006

Imagine an America in which school officials could strip search every
student in their school based on the unsubstantiated tip that one of them
might have a joint. Congress is voting on a bill Tuesday or Wednesday
that could make these police state tactics more common.

We can stop Congress in its tracks, though. Call your representative RIGHT
NOW and tell them to vote against this dangerous bill.

If you don't know who your House representative is, simply call the
Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and give them your address. They'll
connect you directly with your representative's office. When you get a
staffer on the phone, politely say something like:

"My name is [your name] and I live in [your city]. I'm calling to urge
[the congressman/the congresswoman] to vote against the Student and
Teacher Safety Act (HR 5295) when it comes to the floor this week. This
bill would allow schools and police to invasively search large groups of
innocent students based on the mere suspicion that just one of them has
drugs. It strips Americans of their 4th Amendment rights. Please let me
know how [the congressman/the congresswoman] votes."

MORE INFORMATION

The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006 (HR 5295) is a sloppily written
bill that would require any school receiving federal funding (essentially
every public school) to adopt policies allowing teachers and school
officials to conduct random, warrantless searches of every student, at any
time, for essentially any reason they want. All they would have to do is
say they suspect one of their students might be carrying drugs, and then
they could conduct a wide scale search of every student in the building.
These searches could be pat-downs, bag searches, or strip searches
depending on how far school administrators wanted to go. Although courts
would have the power to overturn policies that went "too far", it could
take years - possibly decades - to safeguard the rights of students in
every school.

Disconnecting searches from individualized suspicion is what led to the
Goose Creek scandal in 2003. That South Carolina city sent a machine-gun
toting SWAT team into a high school because the principal suspected one of
the students might be selling marijuana. 150 terrified students were
handcuffed and forced to the%2

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