St. Paul’s Nursery School v. Office of the State Superintendent of Education

The D.C. Office of the State Secretary of Education (OSSE) decided to require the schools it licenses to institute a program of random drug and alcohol testing for their teachers and staff. We represented a church-affiliated nursery school in resisting that effort. We claim that such random drug testing violates the Fourth Amendment, which generally prohibits suspicionless searches. In May 2016, Administrative Judge Paul Hardy at the D.C. Office of Administrative Hearings issued a final decision reversing OSSE’s notice of intent to revoke our client’s license to operate as a nursery school and agreeing with us that the statute under which OSSE purported to require random drug testing had to be interpreted to exclude nursery school teachers in order to save its constitutionality. OSSE did not appeal that decision.