PRIVATE SCHOOL TO TEST EFFECT OF SCREENING ALL STUDENTS FOR DRUGS

New Policy Hailed As Defense Against Teen Peer Pressure

CHICAGO -- At St. Patrick High School on Chicago's Far West Side,
teachers and parents like the image to be clean-cut: no gym shoes, no
funny hair colors or body piercings. Dress slacks, a collared shirt,
and neatly trimmed hair are the norm.

But tidy as the school seems, these are teenagers, given to peer
pressure and temptations. So St. Patrick officials, with the strong
backing of parents, unanimously decided this fall to approve drug
testing all 990 of its students, putting the all-boys Catholic school
in league with a small fraternity of private schools nationwide that
are going beyond a Supreme Court ruling allowing public schools to
drug test students in athletics or other extracurricular activities.

Beginning next school year, every student will have about 15 hairs
snipped 1 1/2 inches, to be tested by Psychemedics, a Cambridge,
Mass.-based drug testing company. While some critics contend that hair
testing produces too many false positives, the company says it is the
surest way to tell how often and how much a student is using because
indicators stay in the hair weeks longer than in urine.

The results take up to a week. If it is positive, the student will be
called in with his family and counseled. Students with positive
results will face a second test within 100 days, as will 25 percent of
the student body, picked at random. A student caught twice could face
expulsion.

There have been rumblings among students that school officials are
stepping over the line. But just as many welcome the testing,
according to students and school officials who say it gives students
an easy out in the face of strong peer pressure.

"This is a great tool for kids to be able to say no without feeling
like a nerd, without saying, `I'm going to get in trouble with my mom
and dad,' " said Emmett McGovern, a parent, counselor, and coach at
St. Patrick.

David Hibbler, a 15-year-old sophomore at the school, said he has felt
the pressure but has always been able to say no. The drug testing will
make that simpler, he said. "It allows the students to really focus on
their studies and just being a teenager."

Drug testing students has been a contentious issue for years, raising
questions about Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable
search and seizure in academic settings.

A study published this year by the University of Michigan, for
instance, found very few schools did testing and those that did saw
little effect on drug use.

Last year, the US Supreme Court said that, in addition to athletes,
students involved in extracurricular activities could be randomly
tested at public schools. The ruling stopped short of allowing
across-the-board testing, although some legal observers said it could
open the door to more widespread testing.

Private schools such as St. Patrick, which do not receive public
funding, are not bound by the high court's ruling.

Graham Boyd, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who
focuses on drug policy and argued last year before the Supreme Court,
doubts the high court would endorse mass testing.

Still, Boyd said, the move sets a dangerous tone. "All schools are
trying to teach civic lessons about the balance between authority and
individual rights, and that school that imposes drug testing is
teaching a lesson that violates the balance that the Constitution
strikes," he said.

While in Boston recently, White House drug czar John Walters suggested
testing in schools could make a dent in drug use. There is no such
testing in Massachusetts, said Fatema Gunja, director of the Drug
Policy Forum of Massachusetts, although New Bedford's mayor has raised
the possibility. Like Boyd, Gunja worries the growth in drug testing
could condition students to forfeit certain rights.

St. Patrick, a Christian Brothers school, got the idea from sister
schools in Louisiana and Memphis and voted unanimously in October to
adopt the policy. "For the kids that have a little issue, I imagine
they're a little nervous," said the St. Patrick principal, Joseph
Schmidt, "because they're going to have to stop if they're screwing
around."

Brother Chris Englert, principal of Christian Brothers High School in
Memphis, said the school gets about 15 to 20 positive results a year
and expels three or four.

Bill Fausey, vice president of Psychemedics, said the company tests
about 140 schools in the United States. Many are private schools and
their numbers are growing, he said. But St. Patrick remains in an
exclusive club, considering there are 130,000 private elementary and
high schools nationwide.

Laura Shelton, executive director of the Drug and Alcohol Testing
Industry Association, said it is believed that only about 5 percent of
the nation's schools do testing. Mass testing is even more rare.
Still, the numbers are on the rise, she said.