STUDENTS CONSIDER DRUG SURVEYS A JOKE

Homestead High School Junior Dylan Currie Was the Winner of the
Golden Pen Award for September.

Dylan Currie, 17, whose letter appeared Sept. 29, has been selected
as last month's Golden Pen Award winner. In the judgment of the
editors, he had the most effective letter to the editor during September.

A junior at Homestead High School, he is involved in student
publications, including the school newspaper, the Spartana, and
Mirador, the school magazine. He's also involved in student
government and has played football. He plans to play lacrosse in the spring.

Currie hopes to study political science and pre-law at Wake Forest
or Duke university after graduation.

He is the son of Joyce Vogely and Doug Currie, and has an older
sister, Erin Currie.

Currie said he wrote the letter because of classmates' comments and
his own research on the topic.

"I've written several pieces for the school magazine about the
drug-testing program in general," he said. "I've been interested in
seeing how random (the testing) was."

He received a gold-plated inscribed pen for her efforts. The Golden
Pen Award was established to express our appreciation for the
contribution our letter writers make to the editorial page. Here is
his letter:

Most people are quick to attribute the drop in cigarette, alcohol
and drug use among Southwest Allen County Schools students to the
random drug-testing program that has been placed in the school
system's two middle schools and one high school. However,
common sense from a student taking those very drug surveys that led
to drug testing can prove otherwise.

In middle and high school, the anonymous drug surveys given to
students are seen as a joke. Not only do kids say they have done
drugs that they have not heard of, they fill in the corresponding
bubble saying they used cocaine more than 50 times a week as a
sixth-grader. Until now, these drug surveys have shown ridiculous
numbers of drug users in the district resulting from the anonymity
of the test.

After the random drug testing was implemented, however, everything
changed. Middle and high school students began to see that these
surveys, while still anonymous, were finally being used for
something: numbers to verify the need for drug testing.

Drug testing is not the Holy Grail to preventing drug use. It has
actually done very little to stop drug use in the district (only
1.9 percent of tested students tested positive). The huge
decline in drug and alcohol use in these surveys can be attributed
to the clever students seeing that if they are honest,
federal grants will not continue to be poured into the district for
drug testing and the program will not be renewed by the school board
at the end of the 2008-09 school year.

Drug and alcohol use should not be as widespread as it is in
schools, but administrators and employees should quit letting
students fool them with a survey and look for something that
actually works, and spend some money on education. After all, that
is what school is for.