Strip-searched students can sue

CINCINNATI – A federal appeals panel ruled Friday that staffers at an Ohio vocational school can be sued by high school nursing students who were strip-searched after a reported theft. The three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected immunity for the school officials, standing by an earlier conclusion that the 2006 search was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back last year after ruling in a similar case that school officials violated an Arizona teen’s rights in a strip search for a prescription-strength drug but that the officials weren’t financially liable. The appeals court in Cincinnati said officials of the Vern Riffe Career Technology Center in Piketon, in southern Ohio, should have known the search was unreasonable for reasons including lack of individual suspects and that the issue was missing money, not health or safety. The court said it had rejected such wide-scale searches in 2005 in a case where a school strip-searched about 25 students because of missing prom money. “Our circuit’s clearly established law on this issue put the school and its employees on notice that this search was unconstitutional,” Judge Boyce F. Martin wrote. The case involves 11 Piketon students who are seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars each in damages for rights violations and emotional distress. The court said students “had a legitimate expectation of privacy in their bodies, the plaintiffs did not consent, the searches were highly intrusive, the searches were undertaken to find monetary items, the defendants searched an entire class of students, and the defendants lacked individualized suspicion.” The search failed to recover the missing $60 and other items, records show.