OUR CHILDREN HAVE THEIR RIGHTS, TOO

Schools should be lukewarm to random drug testing. For one thing it does
not deter drug use, for another it invades the rights of children. The
right to dignity, the right to be seen as innocent until proven guilty, and
the right to keep body parts unexposed.

Teaching children that property, like book-bags and backpacks, may be
searched at random and without cause by police and teachers, and teaching
them that lockers or automobiles are subject to random searches, or
teaching them to urinate in a cup to prove their innocence, is not
something that should ever be considered "for their own good."

Once you've taught a generation to accept government searches without
probable cause, to automatically submit to humiliating body cavity searches
(don't worry, they'll get to that in a few years when they discover that
drug testing doesn't work as promised, it will be required to enter a
school building) and to relinquish body fluids on command only teaches them
that they have no rights.

Adolf Hitler said that if you could capture the mind of the young, you
could hold sway over them forever. He was right. For generations our
forebears taught their children about their rights and responsibilities to
freedom and themselves, and for generations we have stood against tyrants
who would steal away those freedoms and rights. What can come of teaching
acquiescence to authority without question and without probable cause?

As parents, we are the custodians of our children's rights. They have every
right we do, just not the maturity to exercise all of them yet. If we
surrender those rights before they can exercise them, they'll never have
the benefit of knowing those rights ever existed. If the children of today
are without constitutional rights, so, too, are the parents of tomorrow.

JIM WHITE

Oregon