OTHER SCHOOLS GIVE EXAMPLES ABOUT TESTING

When Scott County Schools and Scott Countians Against Drugs started
looking into random drug testing for high school students, they looked
at schools where it worked.

"New Jersey and New Hampshire have national models," said Bob Leonard,
co-chair of SCAD. "One of the people we looked at was Lisa Brady of
New Jersey."

Brady was principal of Hunterdon Central Regional High School in
Flemington, N.J., when that school started testing students for drugs.

In an article from the Student Assistance Journal, Brady said, "...
after implementing Hunterdon's program, student drug use was
dramatically reduced."

The Hunterdon program tests each week, on Mondays and one randomly
chosen day. Seven students in the testing pool are chosen by a
computer program and their parents are contacted and told their child
is being tested.

A vice principal checks the students' schedules to see which would be
the least disruptive time for testing and, when the testing is done,
the nurses who perform the test follow a script so each student is
treated the same.

The students tested are athletes, involved in some type of
extracurricular activity or have school parking permits. Also, some 5
percent of the 1,700 students in the testing pool who do not fit in
those categories have volunteered for the program.

Students who test positive are suspended from sports or the
extracurricular activities, or have their parking permits revoked.
They also go into counseling and must attend four after-school drug
education programs.

That last requirement is critical, Brady said.

"Let it be said right up front that schools with inadequate or
non-existent SAPs (student assistance programs) should not be
considering the implementation of student random drug-testing
programs," she said. "I repeat, the existence of a student random
drug-testing program without adequate referral support from a solid
SAP is, quite simply, a bad idea."

Brady said Hunterdon instituted its drug-testing policy after the U.S.
Supreme Court handed down a decision in 1995 upholding a similar
policy in Washington state. A survey taken at the school in the
spring of 1997 revealed what school officials considered a lot of drug
use and, from September 1997 to August of 2000, the school conducted
tests and saw "a remarkable decrease in drug use among the student
population."

But in August 2000, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the school
on behalf of three students and their families, who said the
drug-testing policy was a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.

The school dropped its testing program while the case was in the
courts for three years. The program was finally upheld by the New
Jersey Supreme Court.

But in those three years, Brady said, multi-drug users, the highest
risk category, saw increases of 316 percent for ninth-graders, 100
percent for 10th-graders, 52 percent for juniors and 209 percent for
seniors.

"These results," Brady said, "presented a devastating backslide from
the progress we had made during our three years of successful testing."

SCAD and the Scott County schools are also looking at the drug-testing
program in Nelson County, where not only high school students but also
middle school students and even board members are tested.

The schools hope to have a community forum on the subject in February
and a number of policies presented to the board by March or April for
its consideration.

The goal is to have the policy in place and testing begun by the
beginning of the 2008-09 school year.