Students have a right to privacy

The argument

High schools should not drug test their student-athletes, because the practice amounts to a major invasion of a student's right to privacy. The invasion begins with the procedure itself. Being required to submit to a test on demand, often in the presence of a school official, is an inherently exposing act, and being made to do it as a condition of playing a sport makes it an embarrassing and unnecessary one. The argument holds that privacy is not a privilege schools extend to students at their discretion but a fundamental right that students carry with them into the building. On that view, a policy that subjects a whole category of students to bodily testing without any particular cause is unwarranted by definition: it treats taking part in school sport as grounds for suspicion, and in doing so violates students' fundamental and constitutional rights. The second invasion is informational, and it reaches well beyond the question of drug use. The American Academy of Pediatrics, a leading US pediatrics group, recommends against in-school drug testing, and the reason it gives goes to exactly this point: the tests can also detect substances that young people take for medical reasons. A test designed to reveal one thing therefore ends up revealing another — a condition, a treatment, something a student may not have chosen to disclose to anyone at school. Schools end up holding information they have no right to know or be aware of, acquired inadvertently as a by-product of a policy aimed at something else. Those two harms compound into a third. Testing communicates suspicion, and the medical disclosures it produces confirm that whatever a student's body reveals may become school business. The result, on the Academy's reasoning, is damage to the relationship between schools and their students. If the privacy cost is this high and this indiscriminate, the policy cannot be justified.

Premises

Counter-arguments

High schools should be drug testing their athletes, regardless of whether it is an invasion of privacy. In 2002, a Supreme Court case ruled in favor of the Board of Education and concluded that drug-testing programs conducted in schools are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. This was a 5-4 vote and Justice Thomas acknowledged that while “schoolchildren do not shed their constitutional rights when they enter the schoolhouse,” he also stressed that Fourth Amendment rights are different in public schools, which have a responsibility to protect their students. A student's privacy interest is limited in a public school environment. In such environments, schools are allowed to infringe upon a student's privacy if it means maintaining a safe and healthy school environment.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The right is not unqualified in the setting at issue: the counter points to a 2002 Supreme Court decision holding school drug-testing programmes reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, with the majority accepting that students retain constitutional rights while treating those rights as narrower inside a public school. [Rejecting P2] On the counter's account the intrusion is weighed against the school's responsibility for a safe and healthy environment rather than assessed on its own, so an infringement the premise classes as unwarranted is treated as justified by that duty.