John Roska answered the following question. He is an attorney and writer. His weekly newspaper column, "The Law Q&A," ran in the Champaign News Gazette. Note: This article has been edited by ILAO staff.

Question

Are locker searches in public schools legal? What about strip searches of students?

Answer

Locker searches are always OK. Strip searches can be OK, but only in a very specific set of circumstances.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." This is designed to protect people from searches and seizures done under some kind of government authority.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court says that public school students have these rights, they rarely find that those rights have been violated. With the Fourth Amendment, they say that rights “are different in public schools.” They say that students “have a lesser expectation of privacy than members of the population generally.”

The Supreme Court has approved everything but strip searches. It first approved clothing and purse searches of students suspected of smoking. Then, it said it was OK to drug test athletes. It even approved random drug testing of any student participating in any extracurricular activity.

Justice Thomas said that urine tests are “minimally intrusive.”

The Illinois legislature has followed the Supreme Court’s lead. In 1996, it passed a law that made it OK to search places and areas such as lockers, desks, and parking lots. It made it OK to search equipment owned or controlled by the school. Finally, it made it OK to search personal items in those places owned by students. They could search these places and areas without consent or a search warrant.

They decided that students do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in these areas. Students also have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the personal items left in those areas.

That may surprise some students. It is also a little inconsistent to say teachers’ cars are private, but not students’.

The Illinois law gives a green light to anything short of a strip search. Student lockers, backpacks, and their vehicles in school parking lots can be searched.

The law says the school can turn over to law enforcement anything a search finds.

The U.S. Supreme Court has found that only public school strip searches violate the Fourth Amendment. In 2009, it said a strip search could be okay when a student was suspected of committing a crime and hiding dangerous contraband on their person.  But in this case, the Court did not think the hidden ibuprofen being searched was a dangerous enough drug to justify a strip search. It determined the item must be a higher potential risk to students.  

Although strip searches of students are possible in limited cases, they are risky for the school. If the school suspects there’s truly dangerous contraband hidden in a student’s clothes, they should call the police.