Testing Students for Drugs - A Case For Those Opposed - Trinidad School District No. 1 v. Lopez, 963 P. 2d 1095 (Col. 1998)

Last week, we looked at a case which favored testing students for drugs. Here's one for the flip side.

In one of several cases that relied on the Vernonia ruling as a precedent, the Supreme Court of Colorado held that the school policy of Trinidad violated the Fourth Amendment. This occurred after an instance where a student who was a member of the high school marching band, was suspended for failing to submit to a suspicionless drug test. The policy in question also applied to students participating in non-athletic activities. In this ruling, the Colorado court applied the balancing test used by the Supreme Court in Vernonia, which has two guidelines, 1) that high school marching band members had a higher privacy expectation than student athletes because they did not share communal undressing situations rehired of athletes, and their activity was tied to a for-credit, graded school class, and 2) the over-inclusive testing program was not an “efficacious means of dealing with the district’s drug problem.”