Teacher alleges strip search by school nurse violated Fourth Amendment

A teacher in Virginia has sued school officials for civil rights violations following an alleged strip search. According to her complaint, after the parent of one of her students reported a child with scabies, the assistant principle interrupted the teacher's class and escorted her from her classroom to the nurse's office where she was forced to remove everything but her undergarments. The nurse looked her over, but found nothing. The teacher then "returned to her class to continue teaching though very upset." According to the Courthouse News service:

[She] says the search violated her Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to bodily privacy.

 

"Because a parent or guardian of the student made an unsupported allegation, with no rational connection to the plaintiff, the defendants responded with an intrusive search," she says in the lawsuit. "The search was unjustified at its inception, and the nature of the search as conducted - removing Ms. Anderson's clothes to inspect her body for mites - was not reasonable to the perceived or alleged problem in its scope, and unsupported by any objective facts."

 

Anderson, who says she suffers from severe mental anguish and embarrassment from the search, seeks $622,000 in damages.