DRUG TESTING STUDENTS

District ought to emphasize anti-drug education.
Schools have at their disposal a powerful weapon in the war against
drugs: education. So why do school officials keep blundering into a
law-enforcement mode, as the Miami-Dade School Board did when it
launched a drug-testing program?

Granted, to be effective, education must be age-appropriate. It must
begin simply during a child's elementary years and become much more
sophisticated in the difficult teen years. Fomenting peer-group
disapproval of drugs is especially crucial in dealing with
adolescents, the age cohort where drug experimentation often begins.

Handled properly, however, education can work, enabling many students
to build up a degree of immunity to the temptation to try drugs.
Witness the drop in children's smoking after the state inaugurated a
clever, well-funded campaign against tobacco.

Not content with its educational role, however, the school board in
1998 approved a watered-down version of then-member Renier Diaz de la
Portilla's drug-testing program. The board set aside $200,000 to cover
the cost of testing some 5,000 students.

By the time the program mercifully expired last week, however, only 37
students had been tested. Two were found to have traces of marijuana
in their system. Their parents were duly notified.

Mr. Diaz de la Portilla probably is correct that the program's failure
was rooted in the board's decision to seek students' consent to be
tested. He'd wanted the test to be mandatory for students chosen at
random from among those whose parents had requested it.

Yet there is something vaguely repugnant in a drug-testing scenario
that randomly picks students who have given no one any probable cause
to suspect that they've ever used drugs, causes them to miss class,
takes them to a test site and subjects them to the indignities
associated with supplying samples of bodily fluids.

So Mr. Diaz de la Portilla's school-board colleagues balked at
mandatory testing, as well they should have. Given an outpouring of
parental concern, however, the board wasn't quite ready to block a
drug-testing proposal in an election year. When the contract neared
its end, however, they happily allowed it to expire.

There still is recourse for those parents who are suspicious of, or
sincerely worried about, their own children: They can take them to
drug-testing facilities to have them checked out, albeit not at
taxpayer expense.

Meanwhile, the school district can get back to concentrating on what
it's supposed to do above all else: education -- including
instructions to counter the lure of drugs.