“Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher.  For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.”

 

Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1928)

The Pennsbury school district’s recently announced policy to use drug sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of student lockers would be laughable if its consequences weren’t so potentially disastrous!  Tragically, the school district’s example gives credence to yet another unwarranted dismantling of the constitutionally protected liberties of American citizens, this time in the name of fighting the war on drugs.

While some observers have noted that such a policy potentially infringes on “students’ civil rights” and to do so is “an important concern”, they justify their support of the policy on the basis that “students have no right to possess illegal substances.”  Based on that flawed logic, since possession of illegal drugs is a crime throughout the United States for students and non-students alike, the police should have the unfettered right to dispatch armies of canines to randomly search peoples cars, homes, boats, purses, briefcases and persons on the off-chance a few individuals might be harboring illicit substances!  Fortunately, even the Supreme Court has recently begun to rule such “fishing expeditions” violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.

What is more disturbing about the actions of the Pennsbury school district is that they reflect a more endemic problem all too pervasive throughout the American educational system, that of failing to provide their students with a thorough knowledge and appreciation of the history and evolution of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Rather than using their bully pulpit with the youth of our nation and the schools themselves as living examples of how to preserve and protect our precious liberties, expediency and political correctness too often provide lessons in flaunting the law and seeking to place limits on the inalienable rights and freedoms guaranteed to every citizen!

  • There can be no justification for conducting warrantless searches of students’ lockers!
  • Imposing special restrictions on the out-of-school activities of students who choose to participate in extracurricular activities when similar constraints are not placed on the general school population denies student athletes, band members and their counterparts equal protection under the law.
  • Teachers are permitted to go on strike and still retain their jobs in jurisdictions where such actions are forbidden by state law.  What are the lessons our students learn from such actions … the law only need apply when convenient?
  • Schools must not be permitted to censor the oral or other speech of their student body unless such speech presents a clear and present danger to the lives or persons of other people.  Only this month, a high school senior was interviewed in national television.  When asked if he believed in the free speech rights of a fellow student who had posted what some would consider patriotic material in his locker and was subsequently suspended for such a transgression, he agreed that there should be no such restrictions … “unless it offended someone”.  Unfortunately, this response is neither unique nor does it stray far from the psychobabble and politically correct policies adopted by all too many schools and universities across the country.  Our schools must provide the foundation for students to grasp that freedom of speech is not only an inviolate right to express oneself on any subject without fear of reprisal … but it is also a solemn obligation to periodically have to listen to, read or even view the speech of others even when the content is an anathema to everything the listener holds sacred.
  • Finally, it is absolutely amazing to find our public schools closed on election days, particularly in light of the fact that many schools are used as polling places.  As a former New Hampshire school board member, we implemented programs to see that all students had an opportunity to visit the gym in their schools during the time their parents and neighbors were exercising their right to vote.  Such forums were used to instruct and stimulate dialogue as to the importance of voting in keeping our country free and preserving our liberties.  Removing students from the schools at such times can only create and reinforce the behavior in which the world’s oldest democracy routinely has the lowest percentage voter turnout of any democratic nation.

Our schools should be the bastions of ensuring the next generation of Americans learn to cherish, and occasionally tweak, our political institutions and ensure that the freedoms for which so many have fought and died are not diminished or muted.  To achieve such ends, our elected schools boards, school administrators and professional educators must take the lead in word and deed in sharing these values and their importance.

Again citing Justice Louis Brandeis, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”