Pubdate: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON) Copyright: 2015 Postmedia Network Inc. Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html Website: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326 Page: C5 TRUST NOW BROKEN Sending a child off to school is one of those seemingly innocuous, everyday things that actually requires adherence to a profound social contract. Parents put their trust in the government to provide safe, clean infrastructure and implement smart, effective administrative policies; they put their trust in school officials to adhere to those policies and foster a strong learning environment; and they put their trust in teachers to enlighten and protect their children for six to eight hours per day. That we give barely a thought to turning our kids over to adults we barely know (or don't know at all) in this way speaks to the excellent work that many of the aforementioned officials do on a regular basis. For the very same reason, however, rare cases like the strip-searching of a 15-year-old girl by school officials in Quebec last week are all the more shocking. The teenager, who'd apparently sent a text message to a friend that joked about selling marijuana, told a Quebec newspaper that staffers at Neufchatel High School in Quebec City ordered her to disrobe in front of two female staffers so they could search her clothes for drugs. The girl also said she was denied the opportunity to call her mother before the search was carried out. The school board has since called the case an "exceptional" one that is subject to internal review. Although drug dealing on school property is a very serious matter - parents also trust that schools will stay on top of that kind of thing - - under no circumstances should staffers be allowed to order kids to remove all of their clothing. Ever. As if that wasn't bad enough, parents' trust was again broken, this time by Quebec's Education Minister Yves Bolduc. "It is permitted to do strip searches, on one condition: it must be respectful," he said, adding there is a legal framework that allows for the practice. How any child can respectfully be ordered to get naked in front of educators, with no external oversight whatsoever, is beyond us. Officials may have genuinely believed that they were simply protecting the institution and its students, but if they had legitimate reason to believe that a teenager was dealing drugs on school property - which would be a criminal matter - the simple solution would have been to call the police. The public furor following Bolduc's comments have suddenly convinced the Quebec government that it needs to review the rules governing strip searches at schools. If that review suggests any remedy short of an outright ban on school strip searches, parents' trust will have been broken yet again. - --- MAP posted-by: Matt