DRUG TESTING BID WILL ALIENATE ALREADY HELPLESS CHILDREN

What are schools for? If you answered education, maybe you're a little out
of date - at least in Northland where education seems to be low on the list
of one school's priorities.

Instead, Kaitaia College principal William Tailby is considering allowing
the school to be used by the police to gather information about
methamphetamine use outside its gates.

In what is being portrayed as a voluntary procedure, the college is asking
parents for permission to drug test their children during school hours. Not
because it's discovered pupils using the drug or even has suspicions about
drug-induced behaviour during school hours, but because the local cop says
the use of methamphetamine, or P, is growing in the wider community.

No one is suggesting that drug use in schools be condoned, but in Kaitaia,
where Senior Constable Brian Camplin seems to be using his role as a
school-board member to facilitate his day job as a police officer, kids
testing positive will be handed over to the police. In essence, it's a
policing shortcut for Mr Camplin and a nice anti-drug flag for the school to
wave.

So does drug-testing work? A study reported in last week's New York Times of
76,000 students across the United States found that drug use is just as
common in schools with testing as in those without it.

Dr Lloyd D. Johnston, a study researcher from the University of Michigan,
said: "It's the kind of intervention that doesn't win the hearts and minds
of children. I don't think it brings about any constructive changes in their
attitudes about drugs or their belief in the dangers associated with using
them."

Drug testing anywhere inevitably brings up the issue of reliability. False
negative and false positive results can, and do, occur. Prescribed medicines
and even herbal teas can skew the results. When drug testing is then used as
a rationale to expel students, a false positive test may have dreadful
consequences for an innocent child.

If the school intends to target only certain students, what criteria will
they use, given there is no evidence of the drug being used at school? It
then becomes an issue similar to the debate on racial profiling.

Do you pick children out because they have features consistent with drug
abuse or do you insist that all students be tarred with the same brush? This
would immediately leave the school open to charges of discrimination, not to
mention invasions of privacy.

Interpretation of results is also crucial. Most tests reveal only if a
student has used a drug recently. It will not tell if the drug was used once
as an experiment or more regularly, or if it was used at school.

And then there's the culture of cheating that drug testing inspires. I'm
reliably informed that drug tests can and are being beaten in New Zealand,
using not only products readily available on-line but even things like
tossing salt or strands of hair coated with hairspray into urine samples.

Certainly the threat of getting caught might limit the drug use of some
students, but think about drug use for a minute. Across society there are
varying levels from the purely experimental to recreational to committed
use. But in teens drug use is generally an outward symbol of social context:
of adolescent experimentation, of dysfunctional homes, and a whole plethora
of juvenile issues.

Surely it would be more apposite for Mr Tailby and his staff to put their
resources behind more pro-active services such as identifying those under
the influence of drugs and providing warnings, detentions and counselling.

Rather than spending limited education budgets on drug testing, the school
would better serve its community by providing parents with resources and by
providing special programmes that keep students on track - from smaller
class sizes to activities that build self-discipline like music enrichment
and sport.

Under Mr Tailby's proposal, Kaitaia College, rather than being a nexus of
learning, creativity and enthusiasm, offering guidance and support as part
of its learning experience, would be shutting its doors to both longer-term
users and first-time experimenters, ensuring those children remain alienated
and helpless.

Drug testing demonstrates a lack of trust between school staff and students,
it reinforces suspicion and could create victimisation and alienation. The
school will be turned into an extension of the law-enforcement community,
monitoring the private activities of pupils and then acting on behalf of the
police.

While drug testing at Kaitaia College may, in the short term, boost Mr
Camplin's arrest record and earn him brownie points with the school board,
it will alter irrevocably the relationship between the school, its pupils
and the wider community.

It will destroy the open communication needed to adequately understand and
support students at risk of methamphetamine use, and it has the potential to
turn ordinary adolescents into criminals.