District considers using drug dogs.

Byline: MATT COOPER The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - Drug-detecting dogs may become part of the drug prevention program in Springfield schools.

The district's superintendent likes the idea. Thurston High School's principal has studied the concept. And parent Dani Wright brought the issue to a recent Springfield School Board meeting with a wake-up call claim:

Her son had to "walk through four kids that were smoking pot to get to his locker" at Thurston, she said.

She advocates the dogs as "a nonconfrontational way of encouraging students to remain drug-free on campus."

Thurston Principal Catherine Spencer said there have been 17 incidents at the school since September when students were found holding drugs or drug paraphernalia, or were under the influence.

"Is it more than I want? You better believe it," Spencer said. "Is it any better or worse than (elsewhere)? That's difficult to say."

From 1994 to 2000, Springfield expelled 236 students, 55 of them for drug offenses in middle and high schools.

School-time drug activity isn't specific to Springfield schools, of course. In a survey last year of 218 Lane County juniors, almost one-quarter of them said they'd been drunk or high at school at least once in the past year.

The Springfield School Board hopes to take up the issue next month - and has at least one supporter in Chairwoman Jennifer Heiss. Dogs that sniff out drugs alert officials to problems on campus and may discourage students from bringing contraband to school, she said.

"It would be random checks, like drug-screening for employers," Heiss said. "Prevention emphasis."

Though other school districts in Oregon use drug dogs, the concept isn't without controversy. Critics say the use of drug-sniffing dogs erodes the bond of trust between schools and their students.

Civil-liberties advocates warn that random searches may constitute a violation of Fourth Amendment protections of privacy.

"People want to use drug-sniffing dogs without suspicion" of illegal activity, said David Fidanque, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. "It's exactly that kind of general search that the Constitution is designed to prevent."

One state Supreme Court decision implied that use of the dogs at a storage facility might have been ruled unconstitutional had it been proven that the dog detected property beyond the public domain, Fidanque said.

School superintendents in the Eugene and Bethel districts both acknowledged that drugs are undoubtedly brought into their schools, but not so frequently as to warrant random canine searches.

But Springfield officials said they're looking for tools to stop kids from taking drugs.

Superintendent Jamon Kent said the dogs relieve students of being labeled tattletales.

"The hard part is the peer pressure," Kent said. The dog "builds the trust, because a person could say to a fellow student, 'You're going to get caught, knock this off.' '

Supporters so far haven't recommended where and when the dogs should be used in Springfield.

Ten schools in six districts throughout western and southern Oregon use a dog through the Oregon State Police, said Sgt. Larry Welty of the agency's drug enforcement section.

During the past four or five years, Welty said there have been "less than a dozen" instances when the dog detected contraband.

Just having the dog on school grounds reduces violations, said Carl Wilson, principal at Coquille High School.

Over the 10-plus years his school has used the dogs, "we have found less (drugs) in the dog searches, and around the school we've experienced less use," he said.

"The only complaint I can remember was somebody said they didn't like the idea we were letting dogs crawl around their kid's car," said Giles Parker, superintendent in the Coos Bay School District, which has used the dogs for three years. "The dog doesn't go inside the car, he just sniffs the cracks in the door and we mark the car down."

The Rogue River School District has avoided legal challenges "by searching the lockers, not the kids personally," Superintendent Charles Hellman said. "The locker is the property of the school, whereas to search a student we would have to have a reasonable suspicion that student was in possession of drugs."

Federal judges set the precedent for drug-sniffing dogs in a decades-old Indiana case, said Diane Geraghty, a child-law expert at Loyola University at Chicago.

They ruled that the dogs don't violate Fourth Amendment privacy protections because "a dog sniffing the air doesn't invade the reasonable expectation" of privacy in a school setting, Geraghty said. "Most case law has said lockers belong to a school and therefore you have no reasonable expectation of privacy."

At Springfield High School this year, there have been eight suspensions for off-campus drug activity and two incidents of on-campus possession, Principal Doug Orton said.

He's reluctant to bring drug-sniffing dogs on campus, but senior Erin Wolff said they would be an effective deterrent because they remove the tattletale stigma.

Still, Wolff added, even dogs can't root out the real problem: society's laissez-faire attitude toward recreational drug use.

"There's definitely drugs on campus," Wolff said. "The problem is that the use of drugs is still too widely accepted."

WHAT'S NEXT

The Springfield School Board plans to discuss the use of drug-sniffing dogs at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 14 at the district administration building, 525 Mill St.

For more information, call 747-3331.

CAPTION(S):

THOMAS BOYD / The Register-Guard Police officer Mike Olsen pauses so North Bend Middle School student Gail Reynolds can get a smooch from Gracie the black lab, who is trained to smell drugs.