[420 Girl]

The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut is calling on the town school board to end its policy of allowing police dogs to sniff student lockers and school parking lots for drugs.

In a letter sent this week to Superintendent Kevin D. Case, the group's legal director, Jon Matthews, argued that "there are better ways to keep students safe than suspicion-less drug sweeps." The push for student safety, Matthews wrote, "should not come at the expense of students' rights."

The topic of drug searches has been a sensitive one in town since a June 5 random sweep at Canton middle and high schools put classrooms in lockdown and resulted in the arrest of one student — then the high school's senior class president — on a misdemeanor possession charge. Police dogs detected a small amount of marijuana in the teen's Jeep Wrangler.

False alerts led to more than 15 students being pulled out of class to watch police officers search their lockers and cars. In the following weeks, a group of parents complained loudly that the sweep was heavy-handed and ineffective, and the school board agreed to suspend its search policy, pending a review.

The board's policy committee is expected to issue recommendations at the regular board meeting Dec. 18, school officials said. The school board then would decide whether to change or maintain the policy.

Lou Daniels, the school board chairman, has defended the sweep as one tactic in deterring youth drug use and said Thursday that although he respects the ACLU as a watchdog group, "I outright flatly disagree that we violated anyone's rights. My position is, it's the public's buildings, the public's lockers. ... Our search was done to keep our schools safe and follow our policies."

Daniels also said he is confident that the review committee will largely keep the drug sweep policy intact.


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