Lockdown drills and searches during emergencies

There is no federal statute that tells a school how many lockdown drills to run. Each state sets its own requirements, usually in a school safety law or a fire code, and the state department of education or state fire marshal publishes them. The number of drills, whether students are told in advance, and whether drills may include simulated gunfire or actors all vary by state.

Because it is state law, it is public. A student or parent can ask the principal for the district's emergency operations plan (the drill part, not the confidential security details) and for the state rule it follows.

In New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985) the Supreme Court held that school officials do not need a warrant or probable cause to search a student, but they do need 'reasonable grounds for suspecting' that the search will turn up evidence the student broke the law or a school rule. A search must also be reasonable in scope: not excessively intrusive given the student's age and sex and what the school is looking for. Reasonable suspicion means specific facts about this student, such as a tip naming him, not a hunch.

A lockdown does not erase that rule. A credible threat that a weapon is somewhere in the school may justify searching lockers, which belong to the school, and may support searching a particular student who was named or seen with something. It does not, on its own, justify emptying every backpack in a hallway. If a school wants to search everyone, ask calmly what the specific reason is. You do not have to consent, and saying 'I do not consent, but I will not resist' keeps both the record and the situation clear.

In Safford Unified School District v. Redding (2009), an Arizona assistant principal, acting on a tip that a 13-year-old had prescription-strength ibuprofen, had her backpack searched, then had a nurse make her pull out her bra and underwear. The Court held that the search of her underwear violated the Fourth Amendment. The tip might have justified looking in the bag and outer clothing, but nothing suggested the pills were dangerous or hidden in her underwear, so the search went too far for what was suspected.

One more rule that changes in an emergency is about records, not bodies. Under the federal student-privacy regulation at 34 CFR 99.36, a school may share information from a student's records without consent if it decides there is an 'articulable and significant threat' to someone's health or safety, and only with people who need the information to deal with the threat.