BREAKING TAMMANY'S TABOO

St. Tammany school officials have agreed to allow students to be surveyed
about drug and alcohol use in the fall in response to a federal mandate,
and that's a step forward for a school district that shot down the idea in
the past.

But the St. Tammany sixth-, eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders won't fill out
the same state-commissioned survey that students in every other school
district in Louisiana will answer. Instead, they'll be taking another
survey, Smart Track, which School Board members deemed less intrusive.

That's unfortunate. The state's Department of Health and Hospitals Office
of Addictive Disorders uses the biennial drug survey data to help design
prevention programs. Because St. Tammany's survey will be different, its
data won't be as useful in that effort.

Allen Ward, program manager for the Office of Addictive Disorders, said
that the Smart Track test doesn't provide as much information about the age
of first use or about underlying causes of substance abuse. Those are
shortcomings that could hamper St. Tammany officials in finding effective
prevention strategies.

Questions in the Smart Track survey are not as detailed as those in the
state-sponsored Communities That Care Youth Survey. The state survey, for
example, asks students to check categories for frequency of use for alcohol
and various drugs that range from never and one to two times on the low end
to more than 40 on the high end. The Smart Track questionnaire provides
more generalized categories such as "never," "seldom," "sometimes,"
"frequently" and "often."

But the fuzzier nature of the Smart Track poll is what appealed to St.
Tammany officials. Some School Board members have suggested that the state
survey could leave students with the impression that heavy drug use is normal.

It's difficult to see the difference between suggesting that drugs might be
used "often" or that they might be used 40 times. Both are clearly an
extreme. Moreover, the fear that such questions will be perceived as an
endorsement just isn't reasonable.

In 2000, the last time the St. Tammany School Board rejected the state
test, board members objected to questions dealing with students' family
life and domestic violence. The Smart Track test was deemed more acceptable
because it didn't probe those issues as deeply.

But home environment is certainly a valid area to explore in trying to
understand why young people turn to substance abuse. It's also an area that
should be of concern to school officials and state health officials.

The School Board's unwillingness to participate in past surveys has meant
that schools and parents haven't had reliable information on how widespread
drug and alcohol use is among students. That kind of ignorance is
dangerous, and it's distressing that it took the threat of a loss in
federal money -- to the tune of $4 million -- to persuade the School Board
to explore student drug and alcohol use.

But perhaps the Smart Track test will help St. Tammany officials overcome
their jitters and in another two years, they'll be ready to fall in line
with the rest of the state.