The announcement goes on, the doors are closed, and curious students pretend not to be looking out the windows into the hallways. It’s a familiar scene in many high schools around the country, Minnechaug included; dogs searching lockers to find drugs.

The Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, in partnership with state and local police, has been conducting dog searches in its schools for over seven years. “We entered into a partnership with the local police and the state police to allow them to come into our building and help us in getting the message to the folks in the building that this is a drug free campus,” said Principal John Logan.



During a locker search, the school administration and the police officers present follow a strict procedure designed to enact a safe and efficient search of the building, and they do so in teams. “There’s usually between four and six teams. Each team has a dog and a state police handler. They might have an additional state police officer, but only one handler per dog,” Logan said. “Then the local police and an administrator are assigned to a team. The administrator’s job is to note any lockers or any areas that are being identified by the dog. They also sniff search the parking lots.”

Each member of the team is important in order to make sure that the search can be carried off without a hitch. “We offer a safety buffer to insure there is no interaction between dogs and students,” said Captain Roger Tucker, a member of the Wilbraham Police Department.

Officer Raul Gonzalez of the Springfield Police Department K9 unit explained that the actual locker searches are done by the school, not the police or the dogs. “The cops just go in at the request of the school district and take the dogs up and down the lockers looking for the scent of narcotics,” he said. “It’s up to the teacher or whoever is in charge to go about the search after we leave.”

When the police and dogs have left, the administration continues the procedure of the search. “When they alert [us], mostly [around] lockers,” Logan said, “we open the locker and see whether there are drugs. So far we haven’t had a problem.”

Insuring the constitutional rights of each and every student is a priority during the searches and Logan stresses that the school is always within its rights to perform sniff searches. It is for that reason that the dogs are restricted to hallways and parking lots and not allowed to enter classrooms. “There’s an expectation when folks come to school, adults and students, that their personal belongings are private and personal and that to search an individual’s private and personal belongings requires a level of probable cause or reasonable suspicion that that individual is violating the law or school rules,” he said. “To have the dogs sniff search the student body without a reasonable suspicion that the specific individual was or had been breaking the law that could well be infringing on the rights of the students. Our desire is not to infringe upon the rights of the students but to maintain a safe and drug free environment.”

Because the dogs sniff only the hallways, the searches are perfectly legal and do not violate anyone’s rights. “We are not entering any place where anyone has a right to privacy,” Tucker said. “the hallway is not somewhere with an expectation of privacy.”

Dog sniff searches at Minnechaug have become almost routine, performed at least once a year, more if time allows. Logan believes that these searches are helping to ensure that the school is a drug free environment. “I see no increase in drug use by students,” he said.