RANDOM DRUG TESTS APPROVED

Students Who Drive, Join Extracurricular Activity Could Be Picked

HAGERSTOWN, Ind. -- Hagerstown Junior-Senior High School next year
will begin randomly drug testing student drivers and students
involved in extracurricular activities.

Nettle Creek school board members approved a random drug screening
policy at their regular meeting Wednesday. A committee of staff,
parents and other community members began working on the policy in 2004.

According to the policy, the purpose of the program is "to educate,
assist and direct students away from drug and alcohol use and toward
healthy and drug-free school participation."

To be eligible to drive to school or participate in extracurricular
activities, activities for which students don't receive grades,
students must consent to being put in a pool from which names will be
drawn randomly for saliva tests. The saliva specimens collected at
school will be sent to a testing laboratory.

Students who test positive for drugs will meet with the principal or
other staff, along with the parents of the student, and will receive
information on counseling and assistance agencies that the family can
contact. Also, the student will be prevented from participating in
extracurricular activities until a follow-up test taken 30 days
later, shows a negative result, the policy says.

Although the entire board voted to approve the policy, board member
Dan Davis Jr. expressed a concern he has voiced in the past that the
consequence for failing a random drug test is different than the
consequence for drug use outlined in the athletic policy.

He said that athletes caught using drugs or alcohol for a third time
are suspended from sports for the rest of their school careers, but
students could test positive three times on a random drug test
without the same consequence.

"What I don't want to see happening is two kids violate the same
policy and one be exempt from the athletic policy because they were
found to have violated it in a random drug screen," Davis said.

Board president Paul Weiss said that since the random drug screening
isn't supposed to be a punitive program, the results of a random test
couldn't be referred to the athletic department for a punishment
under the athletic policy.

Board members agreed informally that the drug screening policy and
athletic policy needed to be examined separately by the board.

The committee used the Rush County School Corporation's random drug
testing policy as a model to develop Nettle Creek's policy because it
has been upheld in litigation.

Western Wayne Schools already has a drug testing policy.

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The policy

According to the new Nettle Creek Schools policy, students who drive
to school and students participating in any extracurricular activity,
such as dances, athletics, or clubs, would be put into a pool. From
that pool names would be drawn randomly for oral testing. Also, any
other student or their parent could request that they be included in
the pool. Students who test positive would be suspended from their
extracurricular activity for 30 days, at which time they would be
tested again before they could resume the activity.