Savana Redding at thirteen
It has been six years since Savana Redding was stripped searched by school officials looking for prescription strength ibuprofen pills.
Redding, 13 at the time, was strip searched when another student was caught with the pills and said she got them from her.
School officials searched Savana’s backpack and found no pills. She was then called into a private room where she was strip searched by a school nurse and a female secretary, who asked her to pull aside her bra and panties. No pills were found.
Savana’s mother sued the Safford Unified School District in Safford, AZ, claiming her daughter’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches or seizures had been violated.
In 2007, a trial court and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals sided with the school. Last July, a re-hearing by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision, insisting that officials were not immune from Redding’s suit.
The school district appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, claiming the ruling “upsets the longstanding tradition of deferring to the judgment and expertise of school officials in highly discretionary matters. The result is an opinion wholly uninformed about a disturbing new trend – teens’ abuse of prescription and over-the-counter drugs.”
Setting a national precedent, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the strip did indeed violate the law.
Today, Savana, 19, is in community college, and said the memory of the incident still haunts her.
“I gave myself ulcers, bleeding ulcers, and I was always worried, mostly about going to school,” she said.
According to her mother, April Redding, “They changed my kid, and they need to understand what they took away from her.”
View current photo of Savana and an interview video below.