United South Central High School, “Home of the Rebels,” in Wells, Minnesota, about 26 miles West of Albert Lea, went on “lock-down” on April 15, 2014 so the school could search the premises for illegal drugs (a.k.a. “controlled substances”).
Drug-sniffing dogs “alerted on” a girl’s locker, as the Minnesota Supreme Court put it. School officials found no illegal drugs in the locker but they found a 3″ pocketknife in a purse in the locker. Confronted, the girl explained that she had inadvertently left the knife, used at her boyfriend’s farm to cut twine on hay bales, in her purse. The School Board expelled the girl for six weeks.
The student appealed this decision and her lawyers prevailed at the Minnesota Court of Appeals. The School District took this all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, arguing that the girl should be held to have willfully violated school policy because she knew of the school’s weapon ban but she acted in “careless disregard” of the school policy by accidentally bringing the pocketknife to school.
We will never know how much the tax-payers paid the School Board’s lawyers to fight this case to the Minnesota Supreme Court. We can be pretty certain that they paid them. It is difficult to imagine the School Board’s lawyers taking on this ridiculous case pro bono.
Shame on this School Board. Congratulations to the student’s lawyers, Nicole Moen and Timothy Billion of the Fredrikson & Byron law firm, who took on the United South Central School Board pro bono. Let us hope that all other Minnesota school boards keep a better grip on their allocation of precious public resources.