Stripped Of Their Dignity?

In the wake of the Littleton, Colorado, high school shootings, some school systems around the country are restricting how students can dress and what they're allowed to say or do.

The American Civil Liberties Union says it has received hundreds of complaints that nervous school officials are overreacting, and may be violating students' constitutional rights. CBS This Morning investigative correspondent Roberta Baskin reports that these kinds of complaints were made long before the Littleton school shootings occurred.

Here's what some students who were strip searched had to say:

David: "He asked if I, you know, had seen anyone who took the money. I told him 'No.' So, I thought that would be it; but it wasn't."

Taylor: "First he needed me to take off my shirt..."

Danny: "...then my shoes and my socks and my pants."

Derrek: "He told me to pull my pants down to my ankles."

Schoen: "They made me go all the way around my boxers to make sure I didn't have anything --hiding there."

Trevor: "We were just told that if you don't do this the police will come... "

Two years ago during gym class at William Monroe High School outside Charlottesville, Virginia, these seven boys and forty three others were strip searched by school administrators. The search was conducted to find a hundred dollars that a fellow student said was missing.

Schoen: "I felt weird. I was just standing there in my boxers in front of the principal of the school. It just didn't feel right."

School officials told the boys teachers would search them.

Roberta Baskin: "If you did not agree, what was going to happen?"

David: "That if I did not agree, then someone from the sheriff's office is gonna come down and strip search us."

Baskin: "They literally said that they were going to call the sheriff?"

David: "Yes they did."

Those excluded from the search were all of the girls in the gym class, the basketball team and the principal's son.

Taylor: "Why them? And only them? They were as liable of taking the money as I was."

Taylor's mother, Joy: "There was no respect for the parents in that we were not contacted prior to this going down. We were not given the opportunity to defend our children to make sure that their rights were protected."

Trevor: "My mom was in the school. She is an employee of the school. She was never told. She was never informed. The school said that they were telling the parents. But my mom did not know."

And Trevor, also a sophomore at the time, didn't tell his mother about the strip serch either. He says he was too embarrassed.

Trevor: "Afterwards my mom found out, and she comes to me and she says, 'You know, Trevor this happened?' And I was like, 'Mom, go away. Don't, don't ask.' I didn't want to talk about it."

Danny's father found out about the strip search from his wife - who heard about it at the grocery store.

Danny's father, John: "We tried to make sure that our children are treated fairly and we- we teach them not to get bent out of shape or try to buck authority. So it made me feel very bad that after teaching Danny that principle, to have him go through this, even if it turned out to be okay."

When Derek told his dad about the strip search, he immediately went to the school.

Derek's father, Jesse: "I talked to the superintendent about it and he denied it, point blank, never happened."
Baskin: "He said that there was no strip search?"
Jesse: "No strip search."

School officials declined to go on camera to explain the strip search incident. But in an open letter to the community, the school board denies that there was a strip search at all. They characterized it as a "limited physical search" in which only shoes and socks were removed, shirts shaken out and pants loosened at the top. The school board assured that "only those students who consented went through the process."

Trevor: "Would any kid 16, 15 years old volunteer to take his clothes off in front of anybody? I wouldn't take my clothes off in front of my parents... Our pants were down. You know our shoes were off, our pants were down, our shirts were off. It was a strip search. If it wasn't a strip search, we wouldn't be here."

Virginia legislator Bob Hull says there ought to be a law to prevent this from happening again. He's drafted a bill that would prohibit strip searches in schools in the state of Virginia.

He says: "In Virginia we don't even strip search if you've been arrested unless it's for a serious offens... And my view of it is, why should we be treating our children to a lower standard than we would treat people who have been arrested for a crime?"

Thirty-six boys in the gym class that day sued and recently settled out of court with the school board for $5,000 dollars each, plus legal fees - a total of nearly $200,000. The school also promised to clarify its policies on student searches.

Debra: "We didn't want money. We brought the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and these lawyers in for an apology, Now that's terrible to have to bring in lawyers to get someone to say 'I'm sorry.'"

Some parents wonder what kind of lesson children learn from being strip searched. What happened in Charlottesville isn't an isolated case. There are many more across the country.

For additional information, you can visit the (National Education Association Website)

Click here for Part Two of this series, where you'll meet a group of elementary school students who were stripped searched in a case involving the theft of $26.

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