Cite as: 536 U. S. 822 (2002)
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
factors; instead, the Court performed what today's majority aptly describes as a "fact-specific balancing," ante, at 830. Balancing of that order, applied to the facts now before the Court, should yield a result other than the one the Court announces today.
B
Vernonia initially considered "the nature of the privacy interest upon which the search [there] at issue intrude[d]." 515 U. S., at 654. The Court emphasized that student athletes' expectations of privacy are necessarily attenuated:
"Legitimate privacy expectations are even less with regard to student athletes. School sports are not for the bashful. They require 'suiting up' before each practice or event, and showering and changing afterwards. Public school locker rooms, the usual sites for these activities, are not notable for the privacy they afford. The locker rooms in Vernonia are typical: No individual dressing rooms are provided; shower heads are lined up along a wall, unseparated by any sort of partition or curtain; not even all the toilet stalls have doors. . . . [T]here is an element of communal undress inherent in athletic participation." Id., at 657 (internal quotation marks omitted).
Competitive extracurricular activities other than athletics, however, serve students of all manner: the modest and shy along with the bold and uninhibited. Activities of the kind plaintiff-respondent Lindsay Earls pursued—choir, show choir, marching band, and academic team—afford opportunities to gain self-assurance, to "come to know faculty members in a less formal setting than the typical classroom," and to acquire "positive social supports and networks [that] play a critical role in periods of heightened stress." Brief for American Academy of Pediatrics et al. as Amici Curiae 13.
On "occasional out-of-town trips," students like Lindsay Earls "must sleep together in communal settings and use
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