The mother of an 8th grader has filed a federal lawsuit in the Northern District of Ohio Federal Court against the Willoughby-Eastlake School district claiming a violation of her daughter’s constitutional rights, failure to train school employees, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
On September 27th, a nurse’s aide allegedly strip-searched an unnamed middle schooler in search of a purported vape pen.
The plaintiff’s lawyer Jared Klebanow, told The Ohio Star that subjecting a student to a strip search is unconstitutional and immoral for anything that poses no threat to other students or damage to school property.
“Students do not check their constitutional rights at the door when they walk into school. Subjecting a teenage girl to a strip search over an object which posed no threat of violence to students or staff was unreasonable and in violation of her civil rights,” Klebanow said.
According to the American Bar Association, strip searches can particularly harm teenagers. Teenagers are especially sensitive to humiliation as they approach puberty and start to evaluate their bodies in comparison to those of their peers and personal standards. Teenagers, therefore, have a greater demand for personal seclusion. For an adolescent, privacy is a crucial indicator of independence and is essential to their personal growth and ability to stand out from their classmates. The stress that follows when a child’s privacy is in danger can severely damage that child’s sense of self.
Klebanow told The Star that he thinks the school overreached.
“Students and parents must be able to trust that public school districts and the adults working within those districts will do everything possible to protect the rights of our students, not violate those rights. In this instance, the district and each of the adults involved in this case failed. People say time heals all wounds, but it is important to remember that, almost always, a scar is left behind,” Klebanow said.
According to the lawsuit, a copy of which was sent to The Star, the middle school girl “begrudgingly agreed” to let another student put a vape pen in her gym locker. Eastlake Middle School‘s principal Colleen Blaurock allegedly took the girl from class that day and interrogated her about the vape pen. The girl reportedly was honest about “what occurred in the girls’ locker room that morning,” but insisted “the vape pen was not hers, that she did not have the vape pen and that she did not know where the vape pen was.”
Blaurock proceeded to search both the student’s gym and hallway lockers but turned up empty-handed.
The lawsuit claims that the girl was then taken to the nurse’s office where a nurses aide Rosalyn Rubertino allegedly forced her to strip down to only her underwear after she was instructed by the middle school assigned nurse Megan Kuhlman, who was not present at the time, to do so. The complaint claims that the district never trained Rubertino to conduct searches.
According to the lawsuit, the school did not offer the girl the chance to decline the search or to depart.
The body search also turned up empty. Following the search, the school suspended the student for two days for allowing her classmate to stash the vape pen in her locker although the device was never located.
According to the lawsuit, the district doesn’t have a policy regarding student strip searches. The middle school’s code of conduct manual for the 2022–2023 academic year mentions random searches of students’ automobiles and lockers but leaves out personal searches.
According to the district’s policy manual, last updated in 2013, only police officers may conduct searches that call for kids to take off their clothing.
Blaurock didn’t ask for a resource officer, despite the fact that the school has one, the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit reads that “Kuhlman has subsequently admitted that she would have never strip searched [the girl] in light of the circumstances presented. Instead, Kuhlman stated that her prior procedure for conducting a search was to ask the student to hold their clothes tight to their skin and if an object becomes visible under the student’s clothes, ask the student to remove the item and hand it to her.”
The complaint continues that the district superintendent admitted later to the necessity of employee training on procedure for searches, “acknowledging that the strip search should not have occurred.”
According to Ohio law, schools can be justified in strip-searching students so long as they have a “reasonable suspicion” that searching will turn up evidence of a violation of a school rule or law that presents safety concerns to the student or others. The school should also perform its search in a “reasonable” way based on what is being searched for and the student’s age.
The Fourth Amendment protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures. Generally, in a case involving an adult, a law enforcement official must have probable cause to conduct a search, or that search will be presumptively unreasonable. But in a precedent established in 1985, the Court held that in a school setting the level of suspicion of illegal activity necessary to justify a search was reduced from probable cause to reasonable suspicion.
According to President Pro Temp of the Willoughby-Eastlake Board of Education Stacy Menser, the board of education received notice of the law suit on December 28th but as of January 3rd had yet to be served with the actual lawsuit. Menser told The Star that so far they have only received a copy of the lawsuit through a media source.
Menser said that at the time of the offense, “the administration met with the parents to promptly address the situation and informed the board of the situation as well.”
She continued that there had been no new developments with regard to this situation until the lawsuit was filed last week. She declined further comment.
“Given the allegations of the lawsuit and the commitment to preserving the privacy of our students and parents, the board will not provide any further comment on the underlying allegations,” Menser told The Star.
In the complaint, compensatory, exemplary, and punitive damages are all sought in an undetermined sum. According to Klebanow, the next step is a responsive pleading from the Defendants. Klebanow told The Star that the student is still attending the school at this time.
Read the complaint:
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Hannah Poling is a lead reporter at The Ohio Star and The Star News Network. Follow Hannah on Twitter @HannahPoling1. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Eastlake Middle School” by Eastlake Middle School.
