Wait—There's a Problem With Strip-Searching Students?
Iowa's Atlantic Community School District recently settled a lawsuit brought by the families of three girls who were strip-searched by a guidance counselor in 2009 after another student reported that her $100 had gone missing. According to the lawsuit, the guidance counselor, Heather Turpin, performed the searches under orders from Paul Croghan, then the assistant principal and athletic director at Atlantic High School. Evidently neither of them was aware that the state legislature had banned student strip searches more than two decades before. They also apparently missed the 8-to-1 decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Arizona public school officials violated the Fourth Amendment rights of a 13-year-old eighth-grader when they subjected her to a strip search because they thought she might be hiding ibuprofen in her underwear (thereby violating her school's "zero tolerance" drug policy). That decision came down two months before Croghan told Turpin to go underwear diving for cash. Croghan, who resigned from his position three months after the incident, is now the principal and athletic director of East Mills High School in Malvern, Iowa. Turpin, who was initially named in the suit but was later dropped from it, is still a guidance counselor at Atlantic High School. The Associated Press reports that the school district agreed to pay each family $100,000.
[Thanks to Mark Lambert for the tip.]
