Parents Support Florida School District's Offer of Drug Testing

By MIREYA NAVARRO

IAMI Sandy Ojeda remembers vividly the first football game she attended
with her 14yearold daughter at the girl's new school earlier this month,
not because of the football but because of the drug raid. Vials came out of
pockets as the police searched a group of teenagers under the bleachers.
One youngster cracked his head open as he resisted arrest.

By the time it was all over, she said, four teenagers had been hauled away
by the police.

"That was my 'Hello, welcome to Braddock Senior High School,"' Ms. Ojeda
said. "But drugs are all over," not just at Braddock.

Ms. Ojeda, 36, a bartender here who also has an 11yearold daughter, is
among the parents cheering the Dade County school board for voting to
institute a sixmonth pilot program in January of random drug testing for
high school students, with parental consent.

The move is a bold one for the country's fourthlargest school district and
one that, national school experts say, will be watched closely by other
major school systems to see how it works, how expensive it becomes and
whether it is a magnet for lawsuits. Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
in 1995 that public schools could require student athletes to submit to
random urinalysis, it left open the question of whether tests could be
extended to all students.

Although opponents argued that drug testing would violate students' privacy
and other constitutional protections, supporters defended it as merely an
easier way for parents to monitor and help their children.

"Why not do everything we can?" asked Renier Diaz de la Portilla, the board
member who proposed the testing. "The invasion of privacy is minimal in
contrast to the benefit we gain in deterring drug use."

It is anybody's guess how many parents will go along with the tests,
although the district budgeted money to test about 10 percent of the
district's nearly 90,000 high school students.

Parents like Ms. Ojeda regret that the testing is not mandatory. "The kids
in trouble are not the ones whose parents would give consent" to the tests,
she said. "The parents are not part of their lives. That's why they're in
trouble."

Although the program's specifics need to be worked out, school officials
say parents will be asked to sign a form accepting or rejecting the drug
testing. The school district will pay an offcampus private laboratory for
the tests and get cumulative data like the number of positive results and
the drugs detected. But test results will go only to the parents, along
with recommendations about where to seek help.

Although students who use or sell drugs on school grounds are now subject
to suspension, assignment to alternative schools and sometimes expulsion,
school administrators said that under the drugtesting program, discipline
and the decision of what to do about a positive result would be entirely up
to parents.

School officials said most students who use drugs are thought to be casual
users of marijuana and alcohol, not hardcore addicts, and could use
existing counseling and prevention programs. The school district is setting
aside $200,000 to start the testing; it spends more than $4.5 million on
other antidrug efforts.

At Braddock Senior High, a school of 5,000 students in western Dade County,
Miami's metropolitan area, some students said they would not mind taking
the drug test but were ambivalent about the benefits. "Maybe in some cases
it'll help," said Marjorie Estrada, 17, "but in a lot of cases, the kids
will forge the signature or tell their parents they don't want to do it."