Pubdate: Wed, 12 Apr 2000
Source: Orange County Register (CA)
Copyright: 2000 The Orange County Register
Contact:  P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711
Fax: (714) 565-3657
Website: http://www.ocregister.com/
Author: Nat Hentoff
Note: Mr. Hentoff is a syndicated columnist an authority on the Bill of Rights

TEACHER UPHOLDS CONSTITUTION

In 40 years of traveling around the country, speaking at high schools and 
middle schools on the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution, I 
have found only a few teachers who can bring the words off the page and 
into the lives of their students.

One of the most passionately knowledgeable of those teachers is Sherry 
Hearn. Voted Teacher of the Year at Windsor Forest High School in Savannah, 
Ga., she has taught social studies and constitutional law there for 27 years.

As at many schools in the nation, Windsor Forest students are occasionally 
subject without warning to dragnet raids by the police, who herd the 
students into the hallways and use dogs to sniff the students, their purses 
and their book bags. Metal detectors are used to scan students' bodies. The 
students are locked into the building for two to three hours while the 
police perform the search. Contrary to the specific words of the Fourth 
Amendment to the Bill of Rights, the searches are conducted without any 
particular information that any student has used or is using drugs. All of 
them are presumed guilty of possessing drugs or weapons unless a police dog 
or metal detector exonerates them.

Sherry Hearn taught her students for years about how the Fourth Amendment 
came into being because of the privacy abuses suffered by American 
colonists due to the sweeping searches and seizures performed by British 
troops. During one of these police sweeps on her school, a student asked 
her why she was so angry at the raid.

"Because I believe in the Constitution," she said.

A policeman overheard her, reported her to the principal and said she 
should be watched during the next lockdown. At the next dragnet search, the 
police also searched the teachers' cars in the parking lot in violation of 
a school policy that teachers' cars could not be searched without the 
consent of their owners. Hearn was not asked for her consent.

A police dog found that morning half of a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette 
in an ashtray in her car. It was still warm. Sherry Hearn had been in the 
school the entire morning.

That night, a caller on the country's Silent Witness line said that the 
cigarette had been planted in the car. He did not give his identity. The 
cigarette was never produced as evidence.

According to school policy, Hearn was told she had to take a drug test 
within two hours of being informed that an illegal substance had been found 
in her car. She had no record at all of previous drug use, and the 
principal, Linda Herman, later testified that the teacher had not exhibited 
on the day of the search, or on any other day, the characteristic behavior 
that would have given rise to a "reasonable suspicion" that the marijuana 
cigarette was hers.

On that day, however, Hearn was given her Miranda warnings and was ordered 
to take a urine test in two hours. She wanted to contact her lawyer before 
taking the test, but he was unavailable that day. Not having legal advice, 
she refused. She also said, "How can I face my students after I've 
consistently told them that these mass drug searches violate their 
constitutional rights?" The next day, having spoken to her attorney, she 
underwent a urinalysis, and it proved negative for marijuana or any other 
controlled substance.

No criminal charges were ever filed against Sherry Hearn, but she was fired 
in the spring of 1996 for not having taken the urine test within the two 
hours set forth in the school's policy.

She has had great difficulty getting a teaching job since losing her job, 
and has lost her appeals to the Georgia State Board of Education and in the 
lower federal courts.

Sherry Hearn's last chance to get back to teaching constitutional law to 
students rest with the United States Supreme Court.

Her attorneys, including a lawyer for the Rutherford Institute, are asking 
the Supreme Court to decide whether "public school students and teachers 
have the right to be free from suspicionless mass drug searches on campus" 
and whether "Hearn should have been ordered to take a drug test based on 
alleged contraband that was illegally seized."

It's up to the Supreme Court to tell Sherry Hearn's students - and other 
young Americans throughout the land - whether she was right in advising 
students "Never, ever give up your rights that people have paid for in 
blood just because it's the easy thing to do."
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