I urge you to oppose HR 5295, the Student and Teacher Safety Act, which was
recenty passed by the House of Representatives and has been referred in the
Senate to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, of which you
are the ranking minority member.

Remarkably, this bill explicitly cites the Fourth Amendment as an
inconvenience, and proposes to evade it by defining loose standards for
searches of students in state-supported schools.  Local school districts would
be required (on pain of losing federal funding) to permit searches of students
on the ill-defined and overly broad grounds of "colourable suspicion."

We all want schools to be safe places, but the way to make them safe is not to
alienate our students by making them constantly the objects of our suspicion.
In the long term, this strategy can only backfire - as we have seen repeatedly
in instances of alienated and disaffected students who plan and commit
violence.  My experiences teaching summer school, as well as my memories of my
own time as a high school student, tell me that schools work most effectively
when students are respected, trusted, and involved as partners rather than as
subjects.