RANDOM DRUG TESTING NOT WORTH THE SACRIFICES

Charles M. Shaddow certainly sounds like he gets it. The
superintendent of schools in the North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional
School District sees the many downsides of random drug testing of
students. He understands that whatever gains might be made by such
testing don't compensate for the sacrifices and the problems.

Unfortunately, it is a position district officials are not heeding.
And we suspect more and more schools will be making the same kind of
mistake.

On Tuesday, the North Hunterdon-Voorhees district approved a $1.2
million federal grant that may be used to develop some form of random
drug testing of students over the next three years. This comes after
the long and successful legal battle by Hunterdon Central Regional
High School defending its right to conduct random drug tests on
students who participate in extracurricular activities and who park
cars at the school.

Shaddow's comments before Tuesday's vote, however, struck right to the
heart of many issues that supporters of random drug tests are too
quick to dismiss. He pointed to the tests' invasiveness and how they
attempt to supercede parental control. He noted how they can erode a
very delicate bond of trust between students and adults.

These problems strike us as a lot to sacrifice for whatever minimal
benefits random testing offers.

We don't know how many students who might otherwise use drugs choose
not to because the sword of random testing hangs over their head. We
don't know how many students who test positive would have escaped
identification without random tests. It is a good guess that the
number is quite small.

Is that worth all the trouble? Shaddow talked about the potential
impact on the very sensitive environment of a high school, and he is
right. Too many officials seem to sit back with the supposedly
reasoned outlook of adulthood and scoff at student resistance to
invasion of privacy as misguided or an act of self-preservation. Or
they sweep aside the notion that student trust is compromised by the
random tests, as if hundreds of teenagers should all intuitively
understand that it's all for a greater common good and accept the
intrusions gracefully.

The goal here shouldn't be to "catch" kids who do drugs. The goal is
to identify those kids and help them conquer their problems. There are
other means to identify those students, and while they are hardly
foolproof, neither is random testing. Moreover, those other means
don't effectively make suspects of an entire student body - or at
least those students a district may have arbitrarily deemed
appropriate to subject to testing. A district, for instance, can
target those students who exhibit signs of drug use, for example, or
who have otherwise raised suspicions among faculty or administrators.
Where there is apparent cause for a test, in other words.

Random drug testing of students is most of all a crutch on which
school officials can lean to try to look tough on drugs. But it does
more harm than good. We hope that message isn't forever lost on North
Hunterdon-Voorhess officials. Or other school districts.