Random Drug testing policy for school employees unconstitutional

Jones v. Graham County Bd. of Educ., No. 08-477 (N.C. App. June 2, 2009), is an interesting North Carolina Court of Appeals case. The court held that a Board of Education policy requiring employees to submit to random, suspicionless drug-testing violates the search and seizure provision of the North Carolina Constitution. When several employees, along with the North Carolina Association of Educators, sued over this initial policy, the board revised it to apply only to employees designated as holding “safety sensitive” positions. 

The court focused on whether the BOE’s policy violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. A “suspicionless search may be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment where special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement impracticable.” . In examining whether the case presented such “special needs,” the court first concluded that the policy’s testing procedure is “remarkably intrusive.” Next, it turned to the question of whether board employees have a lower expectation of privacy because they are employed in a public school system. While public employees whose positions are subject to heavy safety regulations have a lower expectation of privacy, here there was no evidence that the employees were so regulated. The BOE’s premise that “Fourth Amendment rights ... are different in public schools than elsewhere” was misplaced, because that premise applies to the “degree of supervision and control [over schoolchildren] that could not be exercised over free adults.” Finally, the court stated that “the evidence completely fails to establish the existence of a ‘concrete’ problem which the policy is designed to prevent.” Having balanced all the circumstances, the court concluded that “the employees’ acknowledged privacy interests outweigh the Board’s interest in conducting random, suspicionless testing."

Mitchell H. Rubinstein