GUYMON TO ELIMINATE DRUG PROGRAM

GUYMON, Okla. - The Guymon Public Schools board of trustees decided Monday
night to end the 3-year-old program that randomly tested student athletes
and students in competitive extracurricular activities for drug use.

Scot Dahl, vice president of the school board, said the program was
administered by an outside drug-testing firm that provided a list of
randomly selected students to be tested each month.

"We didn't think it was the deterrent that we thought it would be," Dahl
said. "We didn't think it was as effective with the money we spent on it."

School officials started hearing stories about how students tried to beat
the test by drinking bleach or researching test-beating techniques on the
Internet, Dahl said.

One student quit his athletic team before testing came up because he knew
he had smoked marijuana over the weekend, but his test came back negative,
Dahl said.

"Of people that called me, they were 100 percent in favor of doing away
with the program," Dahl said. "A lot of them thought it was a big joke."

The school board discussed the possibility of abandoning the program for
the past few months, with those safety and effectiveness concerns in mind,
as well as some unforeseen consequences, Dahl said.

"One reason was how many kids are not going out to extracurricular
activities because they are afraid of being tested?" he said. "If they're
not in school, they'd be out on the streets. If we could pull more kids in
extracurricular activities where there's a little more supervision, then
they wouldn't be on the streets where they can pick up drug habits."

Now, the school district is looking to hire a liaison police officer who
would be on-site at the junior high and high school and would look for drug
problems in the total school population, Dahl said.

"He'd be trained to look for drugs and alcohol and he'd look at the whole
student body, not just those in extracurricular activities," he said.

The officer, who has yet to be hired, would be paid between $20,000 and
$25,000, Dahl said. The district is waiting on a grant that would pay for
the cost of hiring the officer, Dahl said.

The district will also implement a Student Crimestoppers program and a teen
court program, where a student would have to plead guilty to an offense
before being "sentenced" by his peers, usually to community service, Dahl said.