RANDOM DRUG TESTS RARE FOR TEACHERS

ROBBINSVILLE - Navigate the winding mountain roads into town and
approach Robbinsville High School on a driveway lined by grazing
goats, and you'll find one of the few places in the country where
teachers have been ordered to submit to random tests for drugs and alcohol.

Teachers in the school district are divided over the policy, which
would test all employees and which remains on hold awaiting a state
appeals court's decision. Third-grade teacher Denise Moody has mixed
feelings. "I don't disagree with drug testing," she said, "but some
people, you know good and well there's no chance in the world they're
doing drugs. You know what I mean? They're just not. Why waste your
time on them?" After all, everybody knows everybody in Graham County,
where two school buildings in Robbinsville house all of the
district's 1,200 students. The county is 70 percent government forest
land. A graduating class might top 70 students. Several other school
districts with random drug testing policies also are in rural
Appalachia. At least four in eastern Kentucky have such policies,
with the blessing of a 2004 ruling from the region's U.S. District
Court. But they're among the "very, very few" that randomly test
teachers, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Adam Wolf
said. Another federal district court in southern West Virginia
stopped a similar policy three days before its Jan. 1 start in
Kanawha County. The idea is also on hold in Hawaii's statewide school
district, awaiting a state board's ruling. Exceptional children's
teacher Cheryl Morgan says testing would pull her from the classroom
when she's under pressure to boost test scores and meet deadlines.
Fifth-grade math and science teacher Crystal White, though, says no
one under the influence should have charge of dozens of children.
Teachers groups say the policies violate their constitutional freedom
from unreasonable searches.

"I think when I put my kids in their hands, they lose their rights,"
counters Robbinsville parent Mitch Colvard. "My rights are more
important." Colvard pushed for and won the policy in 2006 as Graham
County school board chairman. He had seen in his day job as a
paramedic a worsening local drug problem, he said.

A lawsuit by the N.C. Association of Educators kept random tests from
starting in summer 2007. Though a judge upheld the policy, the
association appealed. The state Court of Appeals heard arguments in
December. Sharon Larson, a researcher at the Geisinger Center for
Health Research in Danville, Pa., says she doubts random drug testing
among teachers would reveal much more than the common suspicion-based
testing. That's because few teachers use drugs, Larson said. A study
she co-authored in 2007 for the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration found 4 percent of educators reported
drug use. That's fewer than in most other professions, like
construction, with 14 percent, and food service, with 17 percent,
according to her report.

Reports of drug use have spurred the districts that do random
testing. "Like many other folks, we have had a number of our
employees either on or off the job found with drugs or been accused
of having drugs," said Jim Withrow, Kanawha County Schools' general counsel.

Similar headlines led Hawaii's statewide school system to make random
tests part of its 2007-09 contract with teachers, state chief
negotiator Marie Laderta said.

Board members in Graham County had heard only rumors of drug use when
they passed the policy. But then last March, Robbinsville High's
former head football coach was charged with 14 counts of conspiracy
to possess methamphetamine with intent to manufacture, sell and
deliver. Colvard, who lost his board seat in November's election,
doubts many Graham teachers use drugs. But he says the district's
previous policy of testing based on suspicion is "worthless" because
it depends on teachers informing on their co-workers.

New employees are tested, too, but Colvard says that's no better. "If
I know I've got to pee in a cup tomorrow, it'll be clean," he said.
In Hawaii, teachers voted to approve a contract that included both
random drug testing and annual 4 percent pay raises, Laderta said.
But no one has been tested.

Laderta said the teachers' union reneged on its promise, but union
president Roger Takabayashi said the union just wants a ruling on
whether the practice is constitutional.

Courts have ruled certain jobs pose safety risks that override
privacy rights. Judge Joseph R. Goodwin, though, wrote in his West
Virginia decision that a teacher doesn't fit that bill.

"A train, nuclear reactor, or firearm in the hands of someone on
drugs presents an actual concrete risk to numerous people -- the same
cannot be said for a teacher wielding a history textbook," he wrote.