SOME HAVERHILL PARENTS SUGGEST DRUG TESTS FOR TEACHERS

HAVERHILL - Prison guards, school bus drivers and airline pilots are
required to undergo drug tests as a condition of employment. So why
not teachers? That's the question some local parents are asking
following the arrest recently of a teacher's aide at Bradford
Elementary School for illegal possession of marijuana and prescription drugs.

"With a lot of employers, people expect there will be a drug test
before they are even hired," said Sandy Farmer, a member of the
Bradford Elementary School Parent Teacher Organization.

"You're taking someone's child into your care; there should be some
type of program put in place," said Jennifer Morgan, president of the
Bradford PTO. In Massachusetts, The Education Reform Act of 1993
requires school districts to do criminal background checks on all employees.

A drug test, some parents and school officials said, is a natural
next step, especially considering that criminal background checks
confirm only if a prospective employee has been arrested, and only if
the arrest was in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws prohibit employers, including
school districts, from asking applicants if they are drug users.
Naomi Shonberg, an attorney who represents 25 school districts,
including Haverhill, Lawrence and Andover, said districts can
institute drug tests for job applicants without asking teacher's
unions. Random and suspicion-based tests are legal but subject to
collective bargaining.

The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged employee drug tests
as an invasion of employee privacy, equating them with random
searches outlawed by the Fourth Amendment. They said drug tests can
return false positives or reveal information that an employer has no
right to know, such as if an employee or applicant is pregnant or
taking antidepressants. But federal law requires drug tests for all
transportation workers; the state tests workers in its prisons, and
several cities and towns test police and firefighters.

The Massachusetts Department of Education does not keep track of
which school districts test employees for drugs. Representatives from
school districts in Andover, North Andover and Methuen said their
districts like Haverhill do not require any kind of drug tests.
Lawrence school officials did not return requests for comment.

In Haverhill, parents and school officials agreed that Bradford
Elementary School administrators handled Jillian Reynolds, 20, as
well as the district's policy allows. Reynolds' supervisors noticed
her frequent trips to the bathroom and what they described as
"impaired" behavior when she returned. Finally, they asked her to
empty her bag. When they found the marijuana cigarette, illegal
muscle relaxer and anti-anxiety medication, they called the police.
She was fired the same day.

Reynolds, a 2003 Haverhill High School graduate, told a co-worker she
was a former heroin addict, according to police reports.

Phil Kimball, whose daughter Kara, 17, is the Haverhill High student
president, said he would be against random testing, but teachers
should be tested if the district had a cause for concern.

Others said teachers have such constant contact with their
administrators, and schools can easily identify teachers who have
problems and confront them by other means, just as they did with Reynolds.

"If they thought something wasn't right, they'd be on top of it,"
said Maureen Zuber, who has four children in Haverhill schools and
whose husband, Phil Zuber, teaches fifth grade at Silver Hill
Elementary School. School Committee President Robert Gilman said
Richard Langlois, head of the school district personnel department,
told him the district has had fewer than three incidents of drug
abuse in the past 12 years. Over that time, it has employed 1,400
people and 4,600 volunteers, he said. "It didn't seem to be an
overwhelming problem," he said. North Andover Superintendent Harry
Harutunian said his former district in Reading tested all applicants
as part of a $200 physical. In North Andover, he said, he couldn't
justify such an expense.

"If I had the ability to do it, I'd do it," he said. A spokesman for
the state said he could not immediately provide costs for
state-mandated employee drug tests. But Todd Shoulberg, vice
president of Florida Drug Screening, a national company with sample
drop-off sites in Methuen, Lawrence and Andover, said a school
district could start a comprehensive program, which would include
screening roughly 100 job applicants and about 10 employees every
month, for less than $5,000 a year. Shoulberg said his company
conducts tests for school districts in other parts of the
country but not in Massachusetts.

In Westford, an upper-middle-class town of 20,000 people 30 miles
west of Haverhill, teacher drug use became a concern with the arrest
last month of a teacher for possession of heroin. That teacher was
the second arrested on such the charges in the town in five years.

"People are embracing the idea that we are going to pursue this,"
Betsey Andrews, chairwoman of the Westford School Committee, said of
drug tests. "It's their children that are dealing with these teachers
every single day." Westford does not test its students for drugs,
Andrews said. But the School Committee is considering required
physicals and drug tests for all new hires, a policy the district
will then broaden to include random tests for all school employees.