BARTOW SCHOOLS' NEW HIRES TO BE TESTED FOR DRUGS

Future applicants for jobs with the Bartow County School System will
soon have to pass a drug test before they can be hired.

School board members at their monthly business session Monday approved
the final reading of Board Policy GAMA-B, which requires applicants to
submit to pre-employment, post-offer drug tests.

Those to be tested under the policy include new applicants and current
employees who apply for a vacancy in the district, and would apply to
all professional and non-professional, regular full-time and regular
part-time positions, including summer school teachers and paid
non-teacher coach/adviser positions.

The tests would be have to be taken within a 48-hour window that would
begin the day after a hire or promotion is approved by school board
members.

School board members themselves also will be tested as part of a
provision they agreed to add to the policy.

"All the [board] members say, 'We're ready. We want to demonstrate
that it's a plan we like and we support,'" Superintendent John Harper
said.

Harper said the district is putting together a request for bids for
drug tests, which will be paid for by the job applicants. He said the
request should go out this week.

Board members also approved a measure that will see the district submit
to the state a plan that will outline how it will spend more than more
than $3.9 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds from
the federal government.

"In order for us to obtain our funding, we have to submit a plan that
shows what are the projected job savings, as well as in what areas do
we plan on reflecting the expenditure of these funds," said Todd Hooper,
the district's chief financial officer.

Hooper said the funds, which the district will receive in September and
October, will save about 66 jobs.

"The guidelines we got with that were we were going to use that for
positions that possibly would have been eliminated with the reduction of
funds that came from the state, and we've done that," Harper said.
"Essentially, what everybody's hoping for is the economy will rebound in
these two years, the funds will be back available from the state, and the
ARRA funds that are there after two years will no longer be needed -- that
the state will have come back financially and those positions will remain."

Board member Matt Shultz was the sole dissenting vote on the ARRA spending
plan, voicing his objection to accepting the White House's stimulus funds.
He said that while the money may be used to save jobs, some in the
government will use the district's spending plan to count the saved jobs
as created jobs. He said such funding also creates some uncertainty when
developing future budgets as it is unknown if those affected positions will
be able to be funded in coming years.

"I feel like we're kind of being used, to some extent, as political pawns
here for an objective being pushed down from the White House, because
that's
where this money is coming from," Shultz said. "I have a real problem with
that ... [because] at the end of the day, we may never have lost these jobs
anyway.

"This money doesn't come without strings. The string is they're using this
information to serve their own political purpose. Otherwise, why report it?"

"What we know, being here a couple months later, the $3.9 million was not
additional money for us to employ additional people to meet objectives,"
Hooper said, "but it's really replacing funding that the state of Georgia
decided to actually pull out of [Quality Basic Education] funding, so
really
all we've done at this point is we've probably saved jobs instead of
actually
creating additional jobs, which I think probably one of the original
intents
[of the funding] was to say, 'Look how many jobs we've created.'"