Nanny State, Not

Pat Powers has his dander up over the decision by the Aberdeen School Board to drug test students at Central High School. 

Damn them. Damn them for doing it, and damn ourselves for letting it happen.

Somehow we’ve moved from protecting the innocent into persecuting them for the sake of finding the guilty. Ironically, we just turned out a regime with such attitudes in Iraq, and we continue to pay for this newly won liberty in the blood of our children because freedom and liberty as concepts of our system of government are so vitally important us. 

(snip) There ought to be a law.  There ought to be a law against the school continuing to become as a parent. There ought to be a law against such absolute nanny-stateism. There ought to be a law allowing people to recall their school board members.

That's interesting choice of language.  The school becomes "as a parent."  Indeed, there is a long history in our law of exactly that: schools acting as parent.  It's called in loco parentis, i.e., in the place of a parent. Mr. Powers seems to be upset that we are treating children like children.  Children, particularly when they are students, do not have the same expectation of rights as adults have.  The argument against egregious child safety seat laws, which Mr. Powers also opposed as being part of the nanny state, is not that such laws govern children, but that they attempt to replace the parents with the state.  But in the case of the drug testing at Central, parents have the opportunity take their children out of the program.  This is in addition to the fact that schools have a long established legal right to take the place of the parent while the students are in the school. And the way for parents to control this is through elections.  School choice wouldn't hurt, either. 

This does not mean that the school board is correct.  Their policy may be imprudent.  But one would need to know more about the situation at Central to know that.  For example, is there a problem with drugs there?  If so, then the school board's decision looks more reasonable.  Or, as Prof. Newquist argues, maybe the school board is the wrong entity to make this decision. 

There are enough offenses to people's self-government that we needn't gin them up.  It is hardly the problem in our schools that we don't give students enough rights to limit the authority of school officials.