Stripping Students' Rights?

You might be surprised to learn that some schools across the country have turned to strip searching students as a way of tightening school security. During the course of her three month investigation, CBS This Morning Investigative Correspondent Roberta Baskinhas found strip searches are most often done without the permission or knowledge of the students' parents.

"He said, 'Okay sir, I'm gonna need your pants.' And I said, 'Excuse me?' And he said, 'I'm gonna need your pants.' I said, 'Sir, I'm not gonna do that for you'."

Buck Boswell, 14, was strip searched in March for suspicion of drug use. But he wasn't arrested on the streets or strip searched by a police officer. Buck and ten other students at Davis Middle School in Charlotte, North Carolina were forced to strip down to their underwear by their assistant principal and a school security worker.

"I want to have a public apology," Buck says.

What happened to Buck and his classmates happens more often than you might think. We discovered and investigated dozens of cases where students from high schools and even elementary schools were forced to strip in a search for money or drugs.

A class of fifth graders in Atlanta was strip searched because $26 were missing. "I had to drop my pants and turn around..." says a girl named Cherika.

In Centertown, Tennessee, 60 seventh and eighth graders were forced to strip during a search for a ten dollar bill.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, 50 high school boys were strip searched when $100 was missing.

Another high school student named Schoen says, "they made me take off my pants and I was just standing there in my boxers."

In New Haven, Connecticut, 22 fifth grade girls were strip searched for the same reason.

And those were just the cases that made headlines. Others have gone unreported.

They go unreported, says Nadine Strossen, "because these strip searches are so intrusive, so humiliating, so embarrassing, so degrading. Neither the student involved, the young person, or the person's parents want to prolong the humiliation and increase the embarrassment by going public."

Nadine Strossen is president of the American Civil Liberties Union. She says her office has seen an increase in the number of strip searches in public schools. Strossen believes that some schools are so concerned with keeping order that they're ignoring student's rights.

"The Fourth Amendment does not provide less protection to children than adults. It says that all searches and seizures--certainly including strip searches--have to be preceded by probable cause. That means, an individualized suspicion, to believe that a particular person has violated the law or is about to violate the law. There's no exception based on age."

Security consultant Norman Bates does not advocate class-wide strip searches, bt does think that children should be treated differently than adults. "Kids don't have the judgment that we would expect of our adult population. And they just don't understand the consequences as severely as hopefully we would as we've gotten older," Bates says.

And Bates says, more public schools have been turning to him because problems with weapons and drugs outweigh individual student rights. "The bottom line is, unfortunately for students, yes, they should have fewer rights. They don't want to hear that. But the fact is we are responsible for their safe keeping. They're still children. They are not adults until they are 18," Bates says. "And the school has a responsibility to provide a safe environment for all students, not just one."

That position is in line with a 1985 Supreme Court decision which ruled that strip searches in public schools are constitutional if there are "reasonable grounds" to believe it will turn up evidence of a violation of the law or school rules.

Virginia legislator Bob Hull says the legality of strip searches in public schools is unclear. He has proposed a state law that would put Virginia in step with seven other states that already prohibit strip searching. Those states are California, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin.

"My view is that if you think someone has drugs or a gun, and right now in Virginia they have to be expelled from school, then call the police. Because that's a serious offense and the police should be called." says Hull.

But while the state of Virginia joins the debate, Buck Boswell's parents already have made up their minds. "Find me that many (holding up hand) people that say, 'Yeah, go ahead, strip search my kid in the bathroom and make them take off his clothes'," says Boswell.

In Buck's case, the school fired the assistant principal and security worker that conducted the strip search and issued a formal apology to the students. But that's all small comfort to Buck. "I felt dehumanized. I felt violated. It was an injustice," he says.

What can you do as a parent? Parents should explain to their children that they have rights. And if school authorities want to engage in that kind of search, students should object, and ask for permission to call their parents.

Click here for Part One of this series.

Click here for Part Two of this series.

©1999 CBS Worldwide Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed