May it please the court, my name is Annapurna Chitnavis and I am here today representing Mr.

Richard Belding, the respondent in this case. Mr. Belding respectfully asks this court to affirm the circuit courts decision for two reasons. The search is reasonable in its inception and scope and the safety of a school is more important than the privacy of one student. Would Your Honors like a brief recitation of the facts?

Mr. Testaverde, a teacher at Bayside High School, was making sure that all the schools laptops were shut down for the schools loaner laptops program, a website sponsored by the school newspaper was left open. As Mr. Testaverde scrolled down through the website, her found a comment stating that there would be knives and guns brought to school the following week. The comment mentioned Mr. T, which Mr. Testaverde assumed was himself, since he was the only teacher with a last name beginning with a T. Besides that, the comment talked about Mancuso, who Mr. Testaverde knew was Vinny Mancuso, a student in his geometry class. Mr. Testaverde then turned to Mr. Belding, the principal, who asked the students to admit whether they had a gun or not. After many variations, Mr. Belding checked the website to find another comment stating that the weapons were in the students pockets. Mr. Belding commanded a gender-specific pat down with the female teachers checking the female students, and the male teachers checking the male students. When Ms. Simpson checked Ms. Sangria, she found a small glass pipe and a bag of marijuana, which Ms. Sangria admitted as her own. Ms. Sangria was expelled for the possession of an illegal substance.

My first point isThat the search is reasonable in its inception and scope. We can determine whether a case is reasonable or not based on two things: the search must be reasonable in its inception what caused the officials to search in the first place and in its scope the actual extent to who and what was searched, and how the search was conducted. In Florida vs. J.L., the Miami-Dade Police received an anonymous tip that a young black male located at a bus stop was carrying a firearm. When the police searched the three men at the bus stop, the man wearing the plaid shirt, just as the anonymous tip stated, was carrying a firearm, specifically, a pistol. This case states that the inception was unreasonable, making the scope unreasonable as well. The comment on the school blog was much different because it was more specific. The anonymous tip did not state what firearm was to be brought, unlike the comment in our case that specifically stated that guns and knives would be brought to school the next day. In addition to the vagueness of the tip, the comment involved a school setting, while the tip was simply at a bus stop. If a firearm was found at a school setting, that would affect the safety, if not the lives, of hundreds of children, whereas if a firearm was found at a bus stop, it would affect the lives of 2-3 adults. As well as being reasonable in its inception, the search was reasonable in its scope. When the search was conducted, no under garments were taken off, and the male teachers were assigned the male students and the female teachers were assigned the female students. In Safford Unified School District v. Redding, Ms. Redding was instructed to "pull her bra out to the side and shake it,"

and to "pull out the elastic on her underpants to see what might fall out. This was nothing like what happened with Mr. Testaverdes class. In most cases, the students were to simply take out their sweatshirts and jackets. One girl was stripped down to her sports bra, but a sports bra is not a real bra, and she was not instructed to pull her bra out and to the side and shake it," or to "pull out the elastic on her underpants to see what might fall out. In fact, she was not even required to strip down to her underwear. This makes the scope much less severe and much more reasonable than in Safford Unified School District v. Redding.

To my second point The teachers did what they did for the safety of the school, if one gun or knife had not been found, that creates a huge risk for the ALL of the students. In New Jersey v. T.L.O., and in Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton, the safety of the students were more important than the privacy of the students. The hard statistics are, according to (Mom Logic, 2009) 500 people are shot with a gun on accident each year. Last year, about 50,000 people were killed with a knife all around the world. If this search had not been done, this number would have been raised, and raised not with the death of an adult, but with the death of an innocent child. If not just one child, then an adult could have been harmed while preventing the death. Even though no knives and guns were found, the marijuana itself could have caused a lot of damage. (WebMD 2012) states that the effects of marijuana include: increased appetite, slowed reaction time, lung cancer, short-term memory loss, and depression. Do we really want our students to die of things such as lung

cancer and depression when we can prevent it? We cannot afford one child dying, whether it is from a knife, gun, or marijuana, so that another child has his/her complete privacy.

For these reasons, Mr. Richard Belding respectfully asks this court to affirm the circuit courts decision because the safety of the school is more important than the privacy of one student and the search is reasonable in its inception and scope. Thank you.