UNJUSTIFIED INTRUSIONS

Trustees at the Garden Valley School Division are teaching their students
some powerful lessons.

The first and most evident is that those with power invariably wield it,
often arbitrarily or unfairly, and at times with little or no good reason.

How else ought Winkler high school students regard their school board's
decision to randomly test athletes for drug and alcohol use? It is an
outrageous intrusion upon the private lives of students and, if adopted as
a formal policy, it would set a dangerous precedent.

After all, why stop there? Why not install a breathalyzer as a permanent
fixture in school corridors? Indeed, a superintendent of an unidentified
Winnipeg division has raised the possibility with the risk manager at the
Manitoba Association of School Trustees.

Some officials argue testing for drug and alcohol use is necessary to
protect students, particularly those engaged in sports.

But none have provided examples of worrisome conduct, or of incidents
involving alcohol or drugs that indicate a growing risk for the student
body, staff, or any particular group of students.

In Winkler, the drug and alcohol testing policy, yet to be confirmed,
remarkably does not intend to detect steroid use by athletes.

All of this suggests the Garden Valley trustees seek merely the best method
to impose, by coercion, their own social values without interference from
the courts.

That is where such a policy, aimed at students generally, would inevitably
land had they tried to make the right to a public education dependent upon
showing up without a trace of alcohol or drugs in their blood.

That a superintendent would want to give administrators the ability to
demand students submit to a breathalyzer, absent of evidence that alcohol
abuse is a persistent, unmanageable problem for a school, is equally obscene.

School trustees, teachers and administrators restrict the lives of students
during school hours by the very function of the school day, by policies
that dictate responsibilities of all who attend schools, and by rules on
acceptable behaviour.

That power ought not be abused by unjustified intrusions into what students
do on their own time, or with their own bodies. Any policy that does so
must be underpinned by evidence students' safety is imperiled, or their
ability to learn is undermined. Concern about individual's use of drugs or
alcohol during the school day ought to be raised with the student, their
parents and, if it persists, with police or child welfare authorities.

Trustees are responsible for managing the learning environment, not for
dictating teenage lifestyle.

When those running the school step into the private lives of students, they
risk forfeiting their authority and betraying the fragile trust bestowed
upon their positions.

The Winkler trustees should withdraw the policy.