high school proms are a fertile source of legal action

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It's prom season again. What are your school and district doing to sidestep those easily avoidable legal troubles that can crop up at the big dance? In nature, certain flowers are called perennials because they grow back the same time each year. Education law has an equivalent. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Each spring, legal disputes connected with high school proms blossom into headaches and headlines for educators. Like volunteer flowers, these garden-variety lawsuits predictably pop up, marring one of the crowning events in a teen's life. These skirmishes are preventable. By examining the court cases and policy flare-ups below, we will not only tiptoe through the tulips and hopscotch around the poison ivy, we also will examine how to avoid the trouble spots that can besmirch even the most wellmeaning and experienced principals, teachers, school board members, and district administrators. Search and seizure Along with prom, it also is nearly a rite of passage for some students to attempt to smuggle contraband into the prom. (Spike the punch, smoke something in the boys'--or girls'--bathroom, share a flask of sweet, cheap wine.) For students, prom night offers the opportunity for a final, defiant jab at the rules and strictures of school and childhood. To those who are responsible for the health, safety, and guidance of those students for just a little while longer, prom night is a potential early cold snap that could harm, even kill--as it has before--these precious, flowering lives. Sensing all this, administrators go into deterrent mode with preventive strategies, but strategies nonetheless that could seed a federal case. Consider Candice Herrera v. Santa Fe Public School District in New Mexico, where the U.S. District Court issued a restraining order preventing school officials from their standard practice of frisking students at prom for drugs, alcohol, and weapons. The district had experienced problems with students bringing in contraband at earlier proms. Citing the Fourth Amendment, federal courts have ruled that schools can search students without a criminal warrant if districts can demonstrate "reasonable suspicion" and restricts those searches to likely places where the suspected wrongdoing could be concealed. Herrera, a Santa Fe High School student in 2011, attended a prom at a high school in the same district as her own high school. As she approached a security checkpoint table, an officer asked her to spread her arms and legs. (The district had contracted with ASI New Mexico, a private security company, to provide security at the event.) The officer patted down the girl, "touching her arms, her stomach, and cupping and shaking Herrera's breasts; she also lifted Herrera's floor-length dress to mid-thigh level and touched Herrera's legs," the court ruling explains. Herrera was forced to dump the contents of her purse. Security officers confiscated her hand lotion, manicure kit (with nail file and nail clippers), and her prescription medication for dizziness. Herrera sought a court order to prevent similar searches at her own prom. The district's response was twofold: first, that students attending extracurricular activities have a reduced expectation of privacy, and second, that such searches were neither unreasonably offensive nor intrusive when done to protect health and safety. The federal court issuing the restraining order disagreed. Citing numerous public school search and seizure cases, the court concluded that, "there is a substantial likelihood that the practice of patting down students, without any individualized reasonable suspicion, is unreasonably intrusive." The court refused to rule out all prom searches, noting that the intimacy of Santa Fe's search is what raised constitutional difficulties. Dress code Proms have become stylish and fancy affairs. …