A FINE SOLUTION

W-JCC's Voluntary Drug Tests Will Help Parents And Students

The Williamsburg-James City County School Board crept up to the edge
of a disaster and came out with a victory.

Here's what the landscape at the edge of disaster looked like: A
community that agreed on one thing, the need to reduce drug and
alcohol use among its young people. A proposal to impose random drug
testing on a large section of the high school student body, a proposal
that was deeply flawed and certain to land the school district in
legal hot water. A vocal, passionate and organized segment of the
population pushing it to adopt that policy. And a community deeply,
irretrievably divided over whether school-imposed testing is the right
way to get at the problem of substance abuse.

It was apparent, by the time the vote was taken, that the board,
collectively, had arrived at a reckoning of the price for
accommodating the group insisting on a heavy-handed approach. So it
stepped back from the precipice and pulled off a coup.

The board stripped the policy put before it by Superintendent Gary
Mathews of its troublesome elements: the threats to constitutional
protections, the coercive nature, the concerns about confidentiality,
the timing, the usurpation of parental discretion and responsibility.
And through the mechanism of an amendment crafted by Mary Ann Maimone
and unanimously adopted, the board turned the policy into something
positive:

It is voluntary. Parents and children can choose to participate - or
not.

It begins early, when the problem does. Testing will be offered for
grades six to 12.

It safeguards confidentially. Only parents and the test administrator
will be informed of test results.

It puts the decision about what to do about a positive test where it
belongs, with the parents, and assigns to schools the appropriate role
of helping them find support.

It's non-punitive and promotes the anti-drug tool of engagement in
school. A positive test won't result in exclusion from school activities.

Instead of applying the sledgehammer of a divisive policy, the new
approach will hold out an incentive, a resource and support to parents
- - something it was obvious that many parents are desperate for.

By backing away from a proposal that would have imposed testing on all
students who take part in competitive extracurricular activities or
park at school, the board avoided one of the biggest dangers of the
policy Mathews proposed: alienating a significant number of students
and parents. Not just distressing them, but making them feel violated
in an intensely personal way, causing students to pass up activities
that would have been very good for them, and striking at individuals'
deeply held sense of what it means to be an American and free. Doing
so would have carried a great cost, which would have been paid by
School Board members, by students and by the school community.

Finding a way to avoid that is nothing less than a coup, one the board
pulled off with grace and, when it counted, resolve that suits it well.