Following are excerpts from the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions in Vernonia School District v. Acton.:
Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court.
The Student Athlete Drug Policy adopted by School District 47J in the town of Vernonia, Ore., authorizes random urinalysis drug testing of students who participate in the District’s school athletics programs. We granted certiorari to decide whether this violates the Fourth and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution. ...
[The policy’s] expressed purpose is to prevent student athletes from using drugs, to protect their health and safety, and to provide drug users with assistance programs....
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that the Federal Government shall not violate “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures....” We have held that the 14th Amendment extends this constitutional guarantee to searches and seizures by state officers, including public school officials, New Jersey v. T. L. O. (1985). In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association (1989), we held that state-compelled collection and testing of urine, such as that required by the Student Athlete Drug Policy, constitutes a “search” subject to the demands of the Fourth Amendment.
As the text of the Fourth Amendment indicates, the ultimate measure of the constitutionality of a governmental search is “reasonableness.” At least in a case such as this, where there was no clear practice, either approving or disapproving the type of search at issue, at the time the constitutional provision was enacted, whether a particular search meets the reasonableness standard is judged by balancing its intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests against its promotion of legitimate governmental interests....
Central, in our view, to the present case is the fact that the subjects of the policy are (1) children, who (2) have been committed to the temporary custody of the schoolmaster....
In T. L. O. we rejected the notion that public schools, like private schools, exercise only parental power over their students, which of course is not subject to constitutional constraints. ...
Fourth Amendment rights, no less than First and 14th Amendment rights, are different in public schools than elsewhere; the “reasonableness” inquiry cannot disregard the schools’ custodial and tutelary responsibility for children. For their own good and that of their classmates, public school children are routinely required to submit to various physical examinations, and to be vaccinated against various diseases.... Particularly with regard to medical examinations and procedures, therefore, students within the school environment have a lesser expectation of privacy than members of the population generally.
Legitimate privacy expectations are even less with regard to student athletes. School sports are not for the bashful. They require “suiting up” before each practice or event, and showering and changing afterwards. Public school locker rooms, the usual sites for these activities, are not notable for the privacy they afford. The locker rooms in Vernonia are typical: No individual dressing rooms are provided; shower heads are lined up along a wall, unseparated by any sort of partition or curtain; not even all the toilet stalls have doors. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has noted, there is “an element of ‘communal undress’ inherent in athletic participation.”
There is an additional respect in which school athletes have a reduced expectation of privacy. By choosing to “go out for the team,” they voluntarily subject themselves to a degree of regulation even higher than that imposed on students generally. In Vernonia’s public schools, they must submit to a preseason physical exam (James [Acton] testified that his included the giving of a urine sample), they must acquire adequate insurance coverage or sign an insurance waiver, maintain a minimum grade-point average, and comply with any “rules of conduct, dress, training hours, and related matters as may be established for each sport by the head coach and athletic director with the principal’s approval.” Somewhat like adults who choose to participate in a “closely regulated industry,” students who voluntarily participate in school athletics have reason to expect intrusions upon normal rights and privileges, including privacy...
We recognized in Skinner that collecting the samples for urinalysis intrudes upon “an excretory function traditionally shielded by great privacy.” We noted, however, that the degree of intrusion depends upon the manner in which production of the urine sample is monitored.
Under the District’s policy, male students produce samples at a urinal along a wall. They remain fully clothed and are only observed from behind, if at all. Female students produce samples in an enclosed stall, with a female monitor standing outside listening only for sounds of tampering. These conditions are nearly identical to those typically encountered in public restrooms, which men, women, and especially schoolchildren use daily. Under such conditions, the privacy interests compromised by the process of obtaining the urine sample are in our view negligible.
The other privacy-invasive aspect of urinalysis is, of course, the information it discloses concerning the state of the subject’s body, and the materials he has ingested. In this regard it is significant that the tests at issue here look only for drugs, and not for whether the student is, for example, epileptic, pregnant, or diabetic. Moreover, the drugs for which the samples are screened are standard, and do not vary according to the identity of the student. And finally, the results of the tests are disclosed only to a limited class of school personnel who have a need to know; and they are not turned over to law-enforcement authorities or used for any internal disciplinary function....
Finally, we turn to consider the nature and immediacy of the governmental concern at issue here, and the efficacy of this means for meeting it....
That the nature of the concern is important--indeed, perhaps compelling--can hardly be doubted. Deterring drug use by our nation’s schoolchildren is at least as important as enhancing efficient enforcement of the nation’s laws against the importation of drugs, which was the governmental concern in [National Treasury Employees Union v.] Von Raab [1989], or deterring drug use by engineers and trainmen, which was the governmental concern in Skinner. School years are the time when the physical, psychological, and addictive effects of drugs are most severe. ... And of course the effects of a drug-infested school are visited not just upon the users, but upon the entire student body and faculty, as the educational process is disrupted. In the present case, moreover, the necessity for the State to act is magnified by the fact that this evil is being visited not just upon individuals at large, but upon children for whom it has undertaken a special responsibility of care and direction. Finally, it must not be lost sight of that this program is directed more narrowly to drug use by school athletes, where the risk of immediate physical harm to the drug user or those with whom he is playing his sport is particularly high. Apart from psychological effects, which include impairment of judgment, slow reaction time, and a lessening of the perception of pain, the particular drugs screened by the District’s policy have been demonstrated to pose substantial physical risks to athletes....
As for the immediacy of the District’s concerns: We are not inclined to question--indeed, we could not possibly find clearly erroneous--the District Court’s conclusion that “a large segment of the student body, particularly those involved in interscholastic athletics, was in a state of rebellion,” that “disciplinary actions had reached ‘epidemic proportions,”’ and that “the rebellion was being fueled by alcohol and drug abuse as well as by the student’s misperceptions about the drug culture.”...
As to the efficacy of this means for addressing the problem: It seems to us self-evident that a drug problem largely fueled by the “role model” effect of athletes’ drug use, and of particular danger to athletes, is effectively addressed by making sure that athletes do not use drugs. Respondents argue that a “less intrusive means to the same end” was available, namely, “drug testing on suspicion of drug use.” We have repeatedly refused to declare that only the “least intrusive” search practicable can be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Respondents’ alternative entails substantial difficulties--if it is indeed practicable at all. It may be impracticable, for one thing, simply because the parents who are willing to accept random drug testing for athletes are not willing to accept accusatory drug testing for all students, which transforms the process into a badge of shame. Respondents’ proposal brings the risk that teachers will impose testing arbitrarily upon troublesome but not drug-likely students. It generates the expense of defending lawsuits that charge such arbitrary imposition, or that simply demand greater process before accusatory drug testing is imposed. And not least of all, it adds to the ever-expanding diversionary duties of schoolteachers the new function of spotting and bringing to account drug abuse, a task for which they are ill prepared, and which is not readily compatible with their vocation.
In many respects, we think, testing based on “suspicion” of drug use would not be better, but worse.
Taking into account all the factors we have considered above--the decreased expectation of privacy, the relative unobtrusiveness of the search, and the severity of the need met by the search--we conclude Vernonia’s policy is reasonable and hence constitutional.
We caution against the assumption that suspicionless drug testing will readily pass constitutional muster in other contexts. The most significant element in this case is the first we discussed: that the policy was undertaken in furtherance of the government’s responsibilities, under a public school system, as guardian and tutor of children entrusted to its care.... [W]hen the government acts as guardian and tutor the relevant question is whether the search is one that a reasonable guardian and tutor might undertake. Given the findings of need made by the District Court, we conclude that in the present case it is.
We may note that the primary guardians of Vernonia’s schoolchildren appear to agree. The record shows no objection to this districtwide program by any parents other than the couple before us here--even though, as we have described, a public meeting was held to obtain parents’ views. We find insufficient basis to contradict the judgment of Vernonia’s parents, its school board, and the District Court, as to what was reasonably in the interest of these children under the circumstances.
The Ninth Circuit held that Vernonia’s Policy not only violated the Fourth Amendment, but also, by reason of that violation, contravened Article I, Paragraph 9 of the Oregon Constitution. Our conclusion that the former holding was in error means that the latter holding rested on a flawed premise. We therefore vacate the judgment, and remand the case to the Court of Appeals for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
