The Nose Knows All

February 23, 2009 • written by Bailey Patterson

Roscoe the drug dog was the hot topic Friday February 6^th in Brashier Middle College Charter High School’s first investigative visit from the Greenville County Sheriff department.  Discussions about a random drug search to ensure the security of Brashier Middle College began a few weeks prior to the police visit.  “The community brought to our attention that marijuana has become prevalent in our schools,” says Trina Freeman, Assistant Principal at BMC.  The very nature of Brashier and the fact that the school is highly academically focused caused the problem of drugs on campus not to be seen as a prevalent threat.  When other charter schools in the area reported having illegal substances on campus, the administrators at BMC were shocked.  “The last couple of weeks other charter schools have seen substances on campus,” says Freeman, “and obviously we don’t want it on our campus.”  In result to this, a call was made to the sheriff’s department to arrange a time that would be most convenient to come and do a search. 

Plans were still being made to set up a visit from the K-9 units when both a teacher and a student from BMC confided in the administrators that there was reason to believe that there were illegal substances on campus. “Any suspicion of an illegal substance can constitute a search,” said Sergeant Kellett, Greenville County Sheriff’s Department Supervisor of K-9 services.  To ensure that the concern at Brashier was valid, the teacher was asked to wait and make sure the information they obtained was completely true before any further steps were taken.  

On Friday the 6^th, a teacher reported that they had reason, once again, to be concerned that there was marijuana at school.  Seeing that they had limited time to act, administrators at BMC called the Greenville County Sheriff’s Department and asked them to come out as soon as they could to do a drug search.  The Sheriff’s Department said that they would be at BMC in 15-20 minutes, so students were told to stay in their classrooms until further notice.  “Students had to stay in their classrooms so that they wouldn’t ‘shuffle’ the search,” said Freeman.  What was anticipated to be a short wait of 20 minutes turned into 4 hours as the drug search waged on.

“The dog gets ‘tired’,” said Freeman, “it’s not trained to search for hours,”.  So, with a limited amount of searching time, the administrators had to make spur of the moment decisions.  “We did target certain portables and classrooms,” said Mike Sinclair, BMC Principal.  When the K-9 units would get to a classroom the students would be called outside. 

“I was bored out of my mind,” said Eli Cook, a junior at BMC. “When the cops got to our room they made us take our jackets off.” Officers moved through the portables, and if the dog smelled something on a student’s book bag, the student would be called back into the room and a school official would have to go through the student’s belongings. “If the dog hits on anything. We don’t search it we let the school administrators do that,” said Sergeant Kellett. 

At the end of the day the dogs were effective in their search, and substances were found at BMC.   “We hoped that no one would get caught,” said Sinclair, “you just can’t hide it from the dog.”

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