WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed today to decide whether a 13-year-old girl's constitutional rights were violated when school officials strip-searched her for a prescription-strength pain reliever.

The court also will consider, even if the search is found unconstitutional, whether the school vice principal who ordered the search is financially liable for damages.

The federal appeals court in San Francisco last year ruled 8-3 in favor of Savana Redding, who was subjected to a strip search based on a classmate's uncorroborated accusation that she was hiding the prescription-strength Ibuprofen pills. The court, in a 6-5 split, also said Vice Principal Kerry Wilson was financially responsible for violating Redding's civil rights.

Redding was an eighth-grade student at the Safford Middle School in Safford, Ariz., when she was ordered to the school nurse's office and told to strip to her underwear, move her bra to the side and pull her underwear out, exposing her breasts and pelvic area.

No pills were found.

Redding's mother, April, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on her daughter's behalf.

School officials argued that the search was reasonable because pills had been found on campus and another student linked them to Redding. Officials were justifiably anxious, they said, because in an earlier incident, a student had to be hospitalized after taking a prescription drug he had been given by a classmate.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called Redding's ordeal "a grossly intrusive search of a middle-school girl to locate pills with the potency of two over-the-counter Advil capsules."