MCGILL-TOOLEN FIRST MOBILE SCHOOL TO DRUG TEST ALL STUDENTS, TEACHERS

For a few moments today, several McGill-Toolen High School students will
leave class and head to the library to get tested.

Drug tested.

In line with an area movement among several local private schools and the
state-run Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, McGill-Toolen will
become the first Mobile school to institute mandatory drug testing for all
its students, faculty and staff.

"We hope to deter students from using drugs," said the Rev. Bry Shields,
president of the Catholic-affiliated McGill-Toolen. "It's a preventative
measure. If somebody is having a problem, we would like to detect it early
and try to get them the help they need."

McGill-Toolen and Daphne's Bayside Academy are the first schools in the
area to begin such extensive drug-testing programs. The Alabama School of
Math and Science plans to initiate its own next fall.

Bayside Academy Headmaster Tom Johnson reported his school is less than a
week away from having every student tested.

"Once we've gotten it started, we've gotten very little or no feedback,"
Johnson said. "In fact, I've had some students to say we haven't tested
them yet. There doesn't seem to be a problem with it."

At Bayside and McGill-Toolen, parents will be notified when students test
positive. Officials from Boston-based Psychemedics will take hair samples
from each student and examine them for traces of illegal drugs.

Bayside students testing positive are asked to enroll in a counseling
program and are required to be retested at the end of 90 days. Students at
McGill-Toolen who test positive are asked to conference with one of the
school's counselors and a parent. They also will be retested at the end of
90 days, Shields said.

Students who don't pass the test the second time around are asked to leave
both schools. Random testing of students will follow throughout the year.

"Everything is very confidential," Shields said. "Nothing is revealed to
anyone; there's no discipline record."

The results from the school's 1,100 students and 85 faculty and staff are
kept in a locked safe. When results come in, samples are identified by
student number, not name, he said.

Johnson said confidentiality prohibited him from saying whether any of the
total 200 student tests or 80 faculty and staff tests had come back
positive.

Martin McCaffery, spokesman for Alabama's American Civil Liberties Union,
said that while the organization is against mandatory drug testing in
schools, courts have upheld the legality of the practice, even in public
schools. Critics see such screening as a violation of the Fourth Amendment,
outlawing illegal searches.

"Private schools can do whatever they want," he said. "Whether it's
effective or not, that's another question."

Drug tests like the one McGill-Toolen will be using detect five illegal
drugs ingested or injected in the past 90 days: cocaine, marijuana, PCP,
methamphetamines and heroin.

McCaffery criticized the tests for measuring past use rather than current
use, and for not testing for alcohol and tobacco - the most commonly abused
drugs among teen-agers.

St. Paul's Episcopal School in Mobile opted to go for a voluntary student
drug-testing program so that parents can request their children be tested,
Headmaster Bob Rutledge said.

School officials and supporters still are divided over whether such testing
is truly a function of the school, he said.

Under the voluntary program, the school can organize the testing, but only
the parents are notified of the results. In the meantime, the school has
started more aggressively testing students who they suspect may have
problems, he said.

McGill-Toolen sophomore Brittany Jones said she feels the testing program
is well-intended, but she thinks parents should be already tuned into their
teen-agers enough to know whether they're using drugs or not.

"I want to see how it goes," she said. "There's so many other things they
need to be doing besides drug testing."

Mary Lee Conwell, public relations coordinator for Mobile's 270-student
Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, said plans for next fall's
mandatory testing are still under discussion.

All four schools use, or plan to use, the Psychemedics hair-testing
process, which costs about $45 per test. The schools all said they were
seeking grants to help cover the cost of the programs.