Student and Teacher Safety Act of 2006 is a bill that could possibly remove the constitutional rights of students. Even though it is for the right cause (to remove drugs and weapons from schools), but is it fair to us? It would allow school officials and police to search dozens of hundreds of students on the mere suspicion that just one of them had drugs. The bill takes away federal anti-drug funding from school districts that don't adopt policies specifically allowing the expanded, invasive, and possibly unconstitutional searches. Is this a good or bad thing?

Cool. It's about time we got serious about drugs and violence in our schools.

The school can search my locker, as much as they want. I mean, it's their locker, they paid for the storage, as far as I'm concerned, I'm a guest there.

But, as far as I'm concerned, I am just that, a guest. If I had someone come over to my house, I couldn't just immediately search their body, could I?

I draw the line at coloboral suspicion. If my friend Joe says I do pot, and I really don't, yet I get searched, am I not logically going to feel violated? Say several teachers think I'm bringing drugs to school, because I always show up with brown bags. Yet, that's just my lunch. It really is a shifty definition.

Even, "professional experience and judgment" doesn't impress me much. A teacher's professional judgement might say a kid who is loopy, red-eyed, and smells like cigarettes or booze alot, is doing drugs. Several teachers may agree to this, and suddenly, the kid whose parents are smokers, and doesn't get enough sleep, is being searched.

And yes, I do realize there are statistics which argue that kids are being offered drugs, that some carry weapons, etc, the figures they produce, don't impress me. "Six percent reported having carried a weapon on school grounds." Gets to me. Six percent. Out of how many students, how many is that? Besides, how many are going to admit to carrying a weapon either?

"The same survey reported that 29 percent of all students in grades 9-12 reported that someone offered, sold, or gave them an illegal drug on school property within the last 12 months." is even a small number. That's just above a quarter of the amount of students.

I really don't agree with how far they can go. If you want to do night raids on my locker, go ahead. You paid for it, it's yours. But I don't think that you should have the ability to search through my backpack, which I paid for, and is filled with my personal property, just because a bunch of teacher's professional opinions, dictate that I am a pothead.

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Forcing dozens of students to the ground and pointing loaded guns directly at their faces, searching all of them even if they think only one of them has drugs and/or weapons is a little extreme.

Read the bill, please. The bill does not allow for this. That is wrong and should never happen, and to be honest I doubt that it ever did. Don't rely on other people's reading of the bill. If you read it it on your own, I know you will agree that it is reasonable. It is not about searching people at gunpoint and then saying "I thought you had something." It is about coroborable suspicion befor taking APPROPRIATE measures to ensure that people don't have drugs on school grounds.

Read the bill.

Enforcing the law is fine. Searching them, their backpacks, lockers, and what not would be fine. Forcing dozens of students to the ground and pointing loaded guns directly at their faces, searching all of them even if they think only one of them has drugs and/or weapons is a little extreme.

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Originally posted by Bushsupporter:
Wow... No need to tell me to shut up, I either won or you have a counterpoint. If you have no argument to refute mine, then I can only assume I won.

lol

i think that they should scearch these kids dorm rooms and in middle school, the lockers. the only place they need to have guns in the school is the bomd shelter maby not even there!!!!!

If you have nothing to hide, why worry about it? You don't complain when you're forced to walk through a metal detector at an airport. Why should a school be any different?

Now, if these searches included looking for things considered "immoral" (such as condoms, porn, rock and roll CDs, whatever), then I'd object. But if the searches are meant to enforce the law, then I find nothing wrong with them.

Yes, I know my signature contradicts what I'm saying, but you really don't have the freedom to hide things from the law. I don't see what the problem here is.

Wow... No need to tell me to shut up, I either won or you have a counterpoint. If you have no argument to refute mine, then I can only assume I won.

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I hereby declare myself the winner.

If that's what will make you feel good and shut up...

Then I can only assume that I have won this debate.

Seeing no imformed counterpoint I hereby declare myself the winner.

I would read that, but I'm not going to. I'm not that bored.

http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/bills.text/109/h/h5295.pdf
This is the full text of the bill.

Ok, I'll admit you're right that I didn't read the bill, I read YN's summary of it. The link you posted won't work, and I'm too lazy to research it myself. I'll come back later with more shit to debate.

If you read the bill, which it appears you have not, it says that the official needs coroborable suspicion. That means that they need evidence from someone else, not just that they want to search you.

As I said, you seem reasonable. I think that if you read the actual bill, not youthNOISE's account of it or www.kidsshouldhavetherighttocarrydrugs.com you will find that it is in fact very reasonable in the protections that it lays out.

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Totally justifiable. It's the school's locker, they allow you to store your stuff in it...it's their property, you really have no claims to it.

That's what I mean, searching lockers or backpacks if there's a suspicion that YOU have drugs, but searching EVERYONE if they think only one person has drugs or weapons is kinda extreme.

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Where did you get that, is it in the bill? That is extreme and any officer who did that should probably be fired.

It's in the article, the link that's in the first sentance of the post. It's what similar justification allowed to happen in a high school in Goose Creek, South Carolina.

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1. Do you think searching backpacks is over the line?
2. Do you think using dogs to sniff drugs is over the line?
3. Do you think searching lockers is over the line?

No, I don't think any of that is over the line, but that's not what I'm talking about. They don't need real evidence that you might have drugs or weapons, they can just search you and say "I thought they had something."

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At my school, they'll search your locker if they think you have drugs

Totally justifiable. It's the school's locker, they allow you to store your stuff in it...it's their property, you really have no claims to it.

I highly doubt that it will go that far, so I agree with Bush. I don't see what it can hurt. Just don't take drugs to school.

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"forcing dozens of students to the ground and pointing loaded guns directly at their faces during a raid in which no drugs were found."

Where did you get that, is it in the bill? That is extreme and any officer who did that should probably be fired.

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strip searched

Is that in the bill, I don't think so. You seem reasonable which is good. So answer these questions.
1. Do you think searching backpacks is over the line?
2. Do you think using dogs to sniff drugs is over the line?
3. Do you think searching lockers is over the line?

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Bottom line is that kids don't have right to that stuff at school

I know they don't, and I'm not saying they should. I'm saying that there should be some alternative to "forcing dozens of students to the ground and pointing loaded guns directly at their faces during a raid in which no drugs were found." I don't know exactly what kind of alternative, but this is a little extreme. At my school, they'll search your locker if they think you have drugs, but they won't strip-search you while pointing loaded guns at your face.