GO NO FURTHER

When a group of high school students were brought together for a focus
group to discuss the proposal for random drug testing in Williamsburg-James
City County schools, they hit on one of the big problems: It isn't fair to
test just athletes.

They're right.

However, according to the United States Supreme Court, such programs can't
test all students. They can only go after students involved in competitive
extracurricular activities. Which is, on its face, absurd. If a community
wants to get at a drug problem, why single out young people who are full
participants in school life, who are involved in positive activities that
require discipline and commitment? They're probably not the ones likely to
have drug problems.

There are other significant problems with the proposal for random drug
testing being pushed by a group within the community:

Research suggests that such programs aren't effective in deterring or
addressing substance abuse.

Subjecting students in competitive extracurricular activities to random
testing could drive away young people who are teetering on the brink, who
are experimenting with drugs but could go either way, who most need
wholesome activities. That's counterproductive.

There is something offensive about taking advantage of the fact that young
people are in school to force on them intrusive and invasive procedures.
Using schools for this purpose is a perversion of the purpose of public
education. It makes school administrators perform a function that has
nothing to do with education, one that will throw up a barrier to their
ability to build trust-based relationships with students. It transforms
them from educators into law enforcers.

A related objection is that is exceedingly dangerous to have public schools
teaching students that the solution to social problems lies in strategies
that disregard any presumption of innocence, that run roughshod over
citizens' rights to privacy and involve random search and seizure of their
most personal spaces - bodily fluids, in this case - without their
voluntary consent. These are not the kind of solutions on which healthy,
free societies are built.

Education about substance abuse belongs in schools. Testing does not -
especially in the absence of any evidence or suspicion of actual abuse.
Even then, the case can be made that testing and intervention belong in the
family and community-based organizations, not in the school.

For the Williamsburg-James City County School Board to continue to pursue
this proposal will only make it more difficult to do what it must do in the
end: Deny it. For it could only adopt a limited and ineffectual program,
given constitutional protections, and even that would take the high schools
into territory that would work to the detriment of students, educators and
extracurricular activities.