The School Law Blog

The U.S. Supreme Court term that just concluded turned out to be quite a busy one for education, with several cases directly involving school districts and others with implications for districts as employers, for school administrators, and for teachers’ unions. Here are the Top Ten:

Fourth Amendment - Student Rights
Safford Independent School District v. Redding
The justices ruled 8-1 that the strip-search of a middle school student by school officials looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen violated the Fourth Amendment. The majority said such strip-searches were justified only when school officials had "specific suspicions" that a student was hiding contraband in his or her underwear or other "intimate parts." The court ruled 7-2, however, that the officials involved in the search of Arizona student Savana Redding deserved qualified immunity because the case law on strip-searches was unclear at the time.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
Forest Grove School District. v. T.A.
The justices ruled 6-3 that the main federal special education law authorizes reimbursement for private school tuition, even when a child with a disability has never received special education services from a public school district. The majority said that 1997 amendments to the IDEA intended to rein in the costs of private school placements did not remove the power of hearing officers and federal judges to order such reimbursements under the proper circumstances.

Title IX/Section 1983
Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee
The court ruled unanimously that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 does not bar victims of sex discrimination in schools from pursuing claims under an older federal civil rights law, known as Section 1983. The court said the two statutes sometimes cover different legal targets or offer different remedies, and the passage of Title IX was not meant to foreclose claims under the older civil rights law.

Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974
Horne v. Flores
The court ruled 5-4 that two lower courts did not properly consider changed circumstances in the delivery of English-language learning both in the state of Arizona and in the Nogales Unified School District when they found a violation of the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act and ordered increased spending on the state’s ELL program. The majority ordered the lower courts to consider at least four factors on remand: a change in methodology at the state level for English-language learners; the role of the federal No Child Left Behind Act on the state’s program; the record of structural and management improvements in the Nogales district; and the role of an overall education funding increase in Nogales.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Ricci v. DeStefano
The court ruled 5-4 that before employers may take a race-conscious action for the asserted purpose of avoiding an unintentional disparate racial impact, it must have a “strong basis in evidence” to believe it will face liability in a disparate-impact suit under Title VII. The majority held that the city of New Haven, Conn., had to abide by the results of a promotional exam for firefighters in which no black candidates scored high enough to qualify for promotion.

Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville
In a case involving a school district central office, the justices held unanimously that Title VII protects workers who face retaliation for participating in an internal investigation. In an opinion signed by seven members of the court, Justice David H. Souter said Title VII’s anti-retaliation provision covers a school system payroll specialist who complained about crude sexual conduct by her boss during an internal investigation launched on behalf of another employee. The payroll specialist, Vicky Crawford, was dismissed from her job, which she claimed was retaliation.

Public Employee Unions
Ysursa v. Pocatello Education Association
The justices ruled 6-3 that a state's restriction on school district and other local government employee payroll deductions for politics does not violate the free speech rights of unions. The case involved Idaho’s Voluntary Contributions Act, which prohibits school districts and other local governments from using their payroll systems to let workers voluntarily deduct amounts from their paychecks for political causes, such as for the unions’ political action funds.

Qualified Immunity for Public Officials
Pearson v. Callahan
The justices unanimously used a case challenging a police search to effectively overrule one of the court's precedents and make it easier for judges to grant educators, the police, and other government officials immunity from lawsuits challenging their official actions. The justices eased the requirements of a 2001 decision, Saucier v. Katz, that had required courts weighing qualified immunity claims against public officials to first decide whether a constitutional violation had even occurred.

Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
Gross v. FBL Financial Services Inc.
The court ruled 5-4 that a plaintiff bringing a disparate-treatment claim under the age-discrimination law must generally prove that age was the central motivating factor for an adverse employment action. It said the statute did not permit the kind of burden-shifting exercise the court has approved for the main federal job-discrimination law--Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Voting Rights Act of 1965
Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder
The justices ruled unanimously that all local governments, including school districts, in states and jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal approval of any changes in voting procedures, have the right to seek “bailout,” or exemption, from the requirements of the law. The ruling came in a case in which the justices suggested they had strong constitutional concerns about the 2006 renewal of the voting-rights law, but they stopped short of overturning it.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has returned a student strip-search case to a lower court for reconsideration in light of the justices' recent decision on such searches.

In one of its final housekeeping actions on Monday, the last day of its term, the court ordered a fresh look at a case in which 11 nursing students at an Ohio vocational high school sued after they were strip-searched by school officials looking for missing cash and credit cards from some students' purses.

A federal district court denied qualified immunity to the school officials. On an intermediate appeal of that decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled last year that the strip-searches were unreasonable in scope and thus violated the Fourth Amendment.

The appeals court went on to hold that because the 6th Circuit had ruled in a 2005 case that strip-searches of students in a gym class by teachers looking for missing money were unreasonable, school officials in the circuit had "fair warning" that such strip-searches were unlawful. The court upheld the denial of qualified immunity for officials who carried out the strip searches of the nursing students at the Vern Riffe Career Technology Center.

The school district appealed, and the Supreme Court held on to the appeal, Pike County Joint Vocational School District v. Knisley (Case No. 08-1125), while it considered the case of a strip-search of an Arizona student by school officials looking for prescription ibuprofen.

In Safford Unified School District v. Redding, the justices ruled 8-1 on June 25 that the strip-search of student Savanna Redding violated the Fourth Amendment. The majority said such searches were justified only when school officials had "specific suspicions" that a student was hiding contraband in his or her underwear or other "intimate parts."

The court ruled 7-2, however, that the officials involved in the search of Redding deserved qualified immunity because the case law on strip-searches was unclear.

As often happens when the justices are holding similar cases while the court decides a particular issue, they then send those cases back to the lower courts for a fresh review in light of the new Supreme Court decision.

That is what is happening here. The high court vacated the 6th Circuit court's ruling in the Pike County vocational case, and asked it to reconsider in light of the Safford decision.

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What are the lessons for schools and school employees in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision today in favor of white and Hispanic firefighters in New Haven, Conn.?

After an oral argument session in the case that raised all sorts of education-related parallels, today's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano (Case No. 07-1428) is quite fact-specific about firefighter employment and promotional practices in New Haven.

But there are general principles to be drawn from the case. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion for a five-justice majority helps clarify the interplay between two key provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964--the one prohibiting basic disparate treatment (for example, race discrimination), and the one barring so-called disparate-impact discrimination.

"We hold ... that, under Title VII, before an employer can engage in intentional discrimination for the asserted purpose of avoiding or remedying an unintentional disparate impact, the employer must have a strong basis in evidence to believe it will be subject to disparate-impact liability if it fails to take the race-conscious, discriminatory action," Justice Kennedy said.

The case stems from New Haven's refusal to certify the employment tests of white and Hispanic applicants for promotion in its fire department because back applicants performed poorly on the exams.

At oral argument in April, there was much discussion of the city being in a damned-if-they-do, damned-of-they-don't position. If the city didn't certify the results, it faced a lawsuit from the disappointed white and Hispanic candidates who qualified for promotion. If it did certify the tests, it faced a suit alleging a racially discriminatory disparate impact by the black candidates.

But Justice Kennedy essentially said today that New Haven was damned if it did (engage in racially disparate treatment of the white and Hispanic candidates), but not damned if it didn't.

"Our holding today clarifies how Title VII applies to resolve competing expectations under the disparate-treatment and disparate-impact provisions," Justice Kennedy said, in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

"If, after it certifies the test results, the city faces a disparate-impact suit, then in light of our holding today it should be clear that the city would avoid disparate-impact liability based on the strong basis in evidence that, had it not certified the results, it would have been subject to disparate-treatment liability," Kennedy said.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing in dissent, said the majority failed to properly account for the court's landmark 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. In that case, the court held that the power company's requirements for a high school diploma and test requirements for employment had a racially disparate impact on black applicants. The court said such requirements could not be used unless the employer could show the requirements were related to the job duties.

Justice Ginsburg even cited a 1981 federal appeals court ruling in a school case that she said helped define this "business necessity" defense. In Williams v. Colorado Springs School District, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, revived a disparate-impact claim by a group of black teachers who alleged they were disproportionately assigned to black-majority schools.

"If an employer reasonably concludes that an exam fails to identify the most qualified individuals and needlessly shuts out a segment of the applicant pool, Title VII surely does not compel the employer to hire or promote based on the test, however unreliable it may be," Justice Ginsburg said.

Her dissent was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, and Stephen G. Breyer.

As I noted back in April, school districts have been embroiled in disparate-impact claims involving employment testing, although tests for prospective educators tend to come at the entry point, not at the promotional stage, as is common in police and fire departments.

Tom Hutton, a senior staff lawyer with the National School Boards Association, in Alexandria, Va., said in an interview today that the ruling helps settle the tension between Title VII's disparate-treatment and disparate-impact provisions. But he said there were only limited scenarios in which school districts have been in the same position as New Haven, trying to justify race-based employment actions.

"In the biggest possible picture, you could say that if we are going to be relying more on tests to establish teacher credentials, then this decision could have some relevance," Hutton said.

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The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear the appeal of a Christian student group that unsuccessfully sought club status at a high school in Washington state.

The action came on a busy last day of the term for the justices, who also declined to accept an appeal in a special education case and issued an important race-discrimination ruling in the case involving the promotions of firefighters in the New Haven, Conn., fire department.

Education Week's Erik Robelen blogged here earlier today about the decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, and I'll have more to say about its implications for school districts a little later today.

As for the Christian club case, the justices were asked to decide whether a group called Truth had a right under the federal Equal Access Act to be recognized at Kentridge High School in the Kent school district in Washington.

The school's student body governing council refused the club's application, citing concerns about its name and the fact that the club would require officers and voting members to sign a statement of Christian faith, which would be a violation of the school district's non-discrimination policy.

Two lower courts ruled for the school district, with a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, holding in a decision last year that the district did not violate the club's rights under the EAA or the First Amendment.

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the Truth club said the case raised important questions about whether the Equal Access Act protects the right of student religious groups to the freedom of "expressive association."

The club found support in friend-of-the-court briefs filed by such groups as Campus Crusade for Christ and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which argued that non-discrimination policies can interfere with the core ideologies of student religious groups.

The Kent school district opposed Supreme Court review, but it filed a "conditional" appeal which urged the justices to consider whether the district could be held liable when the district itself did not make the decision to bar the club. But the district also argued that the court should take up that issue only if it accepted the Christian club's appeal.

The justices declined without comment to hear both appeals, Truth v. Kent School District (Case No. 08-1130) and Kent School District v. Truth (No. 08-1268).

In the special education case, the justices declined to hear the appeal of Ohio parents about whether courts may look beyond the "four corners" of a child's individualized education program to determine whether a school district is providing a free, appropriate public education under federal law.

In a decision last October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled for the Parma City, Ohio, school district in a case brought by Jeffrey and Sandee Winkelman on behalf of their son.

The Winkelmans notably won a Supreme Court decision in an earlier stage of their case. In 2007, in Winkelman v. Parma City School District, the justices ruled that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act gives parents independent, enforceable rights to pursue legal action on behalf of their children in special education.

The justices declined without comment to hear the parents' appeal--Winkelman v. Parma City School District (No. 08-1089)--of the ultimate outcome of their case.

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By guest blogger Erik Robelen

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled in a high-profile case on the race-conscious actions of government, finding by a vote of 5-4 that the city of New Haven, Conn., erred in refusing to recognize the results of a promotions exam for firefighters out of fear that it would violate the civil rights protections of minorities. The action reverses a lower court decision involving, and supported by, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama's nominee to replace Justice David H. Souter, who is stepping down from the high court.

The ruling has potential implications for decisions on the promotion and hiring of employees by public school districts, though no school groups filed friend-of-the court briefs.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the opinion for the majority, and was joined by Justices John G. Roberts Jr., Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia.

In the case, Ricci v. DeStefano (Case No. 07-1428), 17 white and one Hispanic firefighter who scored well on a promotional exam claimed that the city of New Haven discriminated against them. Because no black or Hispanic firefighters scored high enough on the exam to win promotion to a lieutenant position, and no black test-takers scored high enough to make the list for captain, the city decided not to certify the results, saying in part that it did so to avoid violating discrimination protections for minorities.

A federal district judge held that the city’s action was justified. That decision was ultimately affirmed by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that included Judge Sotomayor, who has come under fire from some conservatives for ruling against the firefighters in this case.

As Mark Walsh noted in a recent blog entry, during the April 22 oral arguments the justices made repeated references to a 2007 schools case in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. In that decision, the court struck down voluntary integration plans in two school districts and sharply curtailed the way schools could use race in assigning students to schools.

Stay tuned for a more detailed analysis later today by Mark Walsh.

UPDATE: Read an Associated Press article about the decision here on edweek.org.

(The Sept. 2007 photo shows New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff in the case, during testing of firefighting equipment. CREDIT: Keith Muratori/Fire Engineering/AP)

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Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. says that if the U.S. Supreme Court were to try to establish comprehensive rules and regulations for the public schools, it probably "wouldn't do a very good job of it."

Roberts was asked at a judicial conference Saturday about what message two recent Supreme Court decisions sent to school administrators. The questioner cited Morse v. Frederick, a 2007 ruling which upheld the right of school administrators to punish a student for displaying a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner at a school event, and last week's decision in Safford Unified School District v. Redding, which held that a strip-search of a student by school officials looking for ibuprofen violated the Fourth Amendment.

"If you were a school administrator, how do you go forward?" the questioner asked the chief justice at the annual conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "What guidance do school administrators get from those cases?”

Roberts responded with "a central point, and it's true across the board: If you're going to get all your guidance on issues of that type from the Supreme Court, you’re going to have a lot of difficulties."

"Just take the strip search example," Roberts added. "In many communities, there are policies, and they don’t care what’s going on, you don’t strip search the children. That’s where a school administrator gets their guidance. It’s only when bodies that have on the ground responsibility for laying out the rules haven’t done so that the courts have to get involved."

The chief justice said the trend holds in other areas of the law, such as anti-trust, patent law, and employment discrimination.

"At every stage, there are other bodies that lay down rules," Roberts said. "You can’t expect to get a whole list of regulations from the Supreme Court. That would be bad, because we wouldn’t do a good job at it."

The chief justice stressed to the questioner that the "flip side" of the recent strip-search decision was that the court held that the school officials involved were entitled to qualified immunity because "they didn’t have very clear guidance and that was largely our fault, in the sense of trying to put down our rules."

"So we laid down a rule on what they can and can’t do," Roberts said, "but we said they [w]ouldn’t have to fork over damages from their own personal funds if they guessed wrong."

The Associated Press reports on Roberts' talk here. The full 30-minute question-and-answer session led by Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson is available on C-SPAN's Web site here. The schools question comes about 18 minutes, 40 seconds into the session.

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A 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court today will require lower courts to re-examine whether Arizona must provide more funding for its English-language learner programs.

The Arizona case is highly complex and quirky, with various state officials pitted against each other. (See my blog posts here and here.) In many respects, it is unlikely any other state will ever reach the position Arizona is in.

But that doesn't mean the Supreme Court's decision in Horne v. Flores doesn't hold important implications for other states and for educators across the nation. It does.

Writing for the majority today, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the lower courts must reconsider orders requiring more funding for English-language learner programs, both in the Nogales school district where the lawsuit originated and statewide after the remedy was expanded.

A federal district judge in Arizona had ruled in 2000 that the state had violated the "appropriate action" language of the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 by failing to provide adequate funding for its ELL instructional methods. Under the federal civil rights law, each state must "take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in instructional programs."

U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins of Tucson ruled in 2007 that a 2006 law passed by the state legislature that increased per-pupil ELL funding and made other changes to the state's program did not go far enough. The state law increased a per-pupil extra amount for English-language learners to $444 from $365, and authorized school districts to seek additional funding for such students. But the law effectively supplanted certain federal funds, and it cut off the majority of state ELL money for any student who remained classified as an English-language learner for more than two years.

That led Judge Collins to conclude that the state's ELL funding system remained irrational and in violation of the EEOA. In upholding the judge's ruling last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit court said in an opinion that "despite considerable efforts, and some improvements in outcomes, Arizona, as a state, does not appear to have turned the corner on ELL education performance."

Today, Justice Alito said, "Both of the lower courts focused excessively on the narrow question of the adequacy of the state’s incremental funding for ELL instruction instead of fairly considering the broader question whether, as a result of important changes during the intervening years, the state was fulfilling its obligation under the EEOA by other means."

His opinion was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer read part of his lengthy dissent from the bench, saying that the majority reached a result that "neither the record nor the law adequately supports. In doing so, it it risks denying schoolchildren the English-learning instruction necessary to overcome language barriers that impede their equal participation."

His dissent was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Education Week's Mary Ann Zehr has this story about the decision.

My focus here will be on some of the national implications. For starters, this case is the first before the justices to implicate the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

One argument made by state officials who brought the appeal to the Supreme Court--State Superintendent of Instruction Tom Horne and the leaders of the Arizona legislature--was that by the federal Department of Education approving the state's Title III plan for English-language learners under the NCLB law, the state was also in compliance with the Equal Educational Opportunities Act.

Justice Alito said the high court majority agreed with the 9th Circuit that compliance with NCLB "will not necessarily constitute 'appropriate action' under the EEOA."

But the state's compliance could be "probative" to the lower courts, Alito said. The 2001 federal law prompted the state to make significant structural changes to its ELL program, and the federal law provided increased funding both for education generally and for ELL programming.

Stepping into another area with national implications, Justice Alito said that NCLB marked a "shift in federal education policy."

"Reflecting a growing consensus in education research that increased funding alone does not improve student achievement, NCLB expressly refrains from dictating funding levels," Alito said. "Instead, it focuses on the demonstrated progress of students through accountability reforms."

Alito referenced various studies, many of which were submitted in a dual of friend-of-the-court briefs on the issue of school finance, that purportedly back his view that there is now a consensus against "increased funding alone."

This point prompted a retort from Justice Breyer, who cited studies that "cast doubt upon the results" of the finance studies cited by Alito.

"Regardless, the relation of a funding plan to improved performance is not an issue for this court to decide through footnote references to the writings of one side of a complex expert debate," Justice Breyer wrote.

Finally, both sides also weighed in to some degree about the efficacy of different approaches to teach English to non-native speakers.

Justice Alito cited the Nogales district's adoption of "structured English immersion" programs as an alternative approach to traditional bilingual education.

"Research on ELL instruction indicates there is docu-mented, academic support for the view that SEI is significantly more effective than bilingual education," Alito said, and thus the lower courts should give greater consideration to the whether the district's experience was a "changed circumstance" that warranted relief from court orders.

Justice Breyer responded that the testimony in the district court "about the extent to which Nogales had adopted the new teaching system was unclear and conflicting. And, most importantly,there was evidence that the optimistic improvement in the number of students completing the English-learning program was considerably overstated."

"Three decades ago, Congress put this statutory provision [the EEOA] in place to ensure that our nation’s school systems will help non-English-speaking schoolchildren overcome the language barriers that might hinder their participation in our country’s schools, workplaces, and the institutions of everyday politics and government," Justice Breyer said. "I fear that the court’s decision will increase the difficulty of overcoming barriers that threaten to divide us."

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The U.S. Supreme Court had a surprising degree of unanimity today in ruling that the strip-search of a middle school student by school officials looking for drugs was unconstitutional.

"Here, the content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion," Justice David H. Souter wrote for the majority in Safford Unified School District v. Redding. It was Souter's final opinion in an education case, and perhaps his last opinion overall, before he steps down from the court in a few days.

All other members of the court but Justice Clarence Thomas joined Justice Souter's opinion on the central issue of whether the strip-search violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches. That was somewhat of a surprise given the tenor of the April 21 oral arguments in the case, when the court's conservatives appeared sympathetic to the school district and even moderate/liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer seemed dismissive of the student's privacy concerns.

In his dissent, Justice Thomas called the decision "regrettable," and said the majority "has surrendered control of the American public school system to public school students ... by second-guessing swift disciplinary decisions made by school officials." (He was in part quoting Justice Hugo Black's dissent in the 1969 student free speech case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.)

The justices examined a ruling last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, that the search of an 8th grader by school authorities looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen pills violated the student's rights under the Fourth Amendment.

A en banc panel of the 9th Circuit court ruled 8-3 that officials at an Arizona middle school "acted contrary to all reason and common sense as they trampled over" the privacy interests of Savana Redding. By a separate vote of 6-5, the panel held that the assistant principal who ordered the strip-search was not entitled to qualified immunity from personal liability in the student's lawsuit.

Today, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the assistant principal and two other officials were entitled to qualified immunity because of a lack of clarity in lower-court rulings about whether strip-searches violated the Constitution. Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined Justice Souter's opinion on the main question of the legality of the search, each issued opinions saying they would have denied qualified immunity to the school officials.

The young woman at the center of the case was a 13-year-old student in 2003 when an assistant principal, relying on a student tip that Redding may have prescription-strength ibuprofen pills that she was distributing to other students, searched her backpack. When that turned up no pills, the assistant principal asked two female staff members to conduct a search of Redding's undergarments. Redding says in court papers she had to shake her bra and panties to reveal whether she had hidden contraband in them. No pills were found in the search.

The key Supreme Court precedent on physical searches of students in public schools is New Jersey v. T.L.O. In that 1985 decision, the court upheld the search of a student’s purse for contraband and found that school searches are justified by a “reasonable suspicion” that laws or school rules were violated. Under the ruling, schools must show that a search was reasonable both at its inception and in its scope.

The Safford Unified School District had argued that the 9th Circuit court misapplied T.L.O., and that the strip-search of Savana Redding was justified at its inception because school officials had "reasonable grounds for suspecting that she was violating" the districts policies against drug possession.

The lawyers for Savana Redding had argued that the student "ended up naked and humiliated in front of her school officials," for a search that was prompted by a questionable tip and which turned up no drugs.

Justice Souter and the majority today essentially agreed with Savana that school officials had no reason to believe that dangerous quanities of the drugs were being hidden in the girl's clothing.

"In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear," Souter wrote. "We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable."

While today's decision is a defeat for school districts, which argued for greater leeway in searching students, it seems unlikely it will really turn over the operation of the schools to the students, as Justice Thomas suggested.

Justice Souter pointed out that the practice of strip-searching students has been viewed as so potentially harmful and fraught with liabilities that some communities, including the New York City school system, have barred school personnel from carrying them out under any circumstances.

And Souter said the majority meant "to cast no ill reflection on the assistant principal," who was motivated by a desire to eliminate drugs and protect students.

The Supreme Court did remand the case to the 9th Circuit to consider whether the Safford school district has any liability in the case.

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From guest bloggers Erik W. Robelen and Mary Ann Zehr

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning ruled that public school officials violated the Fourth Amendment rights of a 13-year-old girl when she was strip-searched at school, but said the official who ordered the search was entitled to "qualified immunity" from liability.

In a separate case being closely watched in education circles, the court also ruled in favor of Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, who had challenged a U.S. District Court decision that Arizona must provide adequate funding for English-language learners in the state.

"[T]he content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion," wrote Justice David H. Souter in an opinion joined by five other justices.

The case has attracted national media attention, as well as friend-of-the-court briefs from national education groups, civil-liberties advocates, and the Obama administration.

At issue in Safford Unified School District v. Redding (Case No. 08-479) is the search of 8th grader Savana Redding by school personnel at an Arizona middle school. The 2003 action came amid suspicion that the honors student possessed prescription-strength ibuprofen tablets, a violation of the school’s anti-drug policy. No such pills were found on Ms. Redding, who stripped down to her undergarments, which she pulled away from her body so that two female personnel, including the school nurse, could inspect her.

In the Horne v. Flores et. al case, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that the lower courts didn’t fairly consider “changed circumstances” that had taken place since parents in the Nogales, Ariz., school district filed the original lawsuit in federal court in 1982, implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act being one of them. The court remanded the case to the lower courts. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote the majority opinion.

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For an Education Week story by me and Erik W. Robelen on today's Supreme Court decision in Forest Grove School District v. T.A. , click here.

The justices will next convene on Thursday, June 25, to issue decisions on Flores and Sanford.

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