MOST OF BOARD FAVOR DRUG TESTING

Mike Wilder Times-News Alamance-Burlington Board of Education members
remain mostly supportive of a proposal to require drug testing for some
high school students in the local system. None of the board's seven
members, interviewed last week, said they are opposed or are leaning
against voting for the proposal.

"I think it's heading (toward approval)," said board member Mary Alice
Hinshaw, "although I don't know if it will be unanimous or not." Hinshaw,
who has voiced the most reservations about the policy, said she's still
undecided and has wavered as the school board, system employees and the
public have discussed drug testing.

She said last week she is more inclined to support the proposal than she
has been at some other points during the debate. The board will discuss the
policy at its April 25 meeting. Under the procedures it uses to consider
new policies, it could vote on the proposal that night, although board
members said they may or may not make a decision then. The policy would
require high school students who participate in extracurricular activities
to agree to random drug testing.

Students who test positive for drug use and whose test results are upheld
would be suspended from activities for three months for a first offense.
The second offense would mean suspension for a year, and a third offense
would mean suspension for the rest of high school. Students who test
positive would be required to get treatment if they wanted to regain
eligibility for sports or other activities. The school system estimates
drug testing would cost the system about $25,000 a year.

Superintendent Jim Merrill has said the proposal is one result of an
undercover drug operation in the system's high schools during the 2003-04
school year that resulted in the arrests of dozens of students on charges
of dealing drugs. Hinshaw, a former teacher, said the drug operation shows
a serious problem with drugs.

"Had we not had that drug bust last year, I feel much more certain I would
be against it," she said. Three board members - Hinshaw, Todd Baker and
Steve Van Pelt - said the policy would likely give students a strong
incentive to refuse to use drugs if their peers suggest it to them. "It
gives students another avenue to turn down that peer pressure," Baker said.
"That's what really strikes me about the policy." Most board members say
the majority of comments they've heard about the proposal have been
positive, with some mentioning margins of at least 3-to-1 or 4-to-1. The
board's chairman, Tom Manning, and board member Jackie Cole are among the
members who say the positive comments they have heard far outweigh the
negative ones. At the last school board meeting, however, several people
criticized the proposal or said they had serious reservations about it,
while no one who spoke enthusiastically supported the proposal. The local
NAACP has announced it opposes the proposal.

Some school board members said that while they want to hear people's
concerns, opponents of any kind of proposal tend to be more outspoken than
people who support an idea. School board member Gayle Gunn said she has at
times been frustrated at the lack of response to the proposal among some
groups that are involved in the schools.

Both Gunn and the school board's vice chairwoman, Brenda Brown Foster, said
they tend to take silence as an indication of support for the policy. When
she recently asked a group of parents if that were a valid assumption, Gunn
said, "all the heads started nodding, 'yes.'"