RULING OPENS DOORS

Court Decision Allows Area School Districts To Expand Drug Tests

Members of the Carthage R-9 Board of Education got the answer they've been
waiting for Thursday when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled
that school drug testing can be expanded to include students other than
those in interscholastic athletes.

Questions remain, however, as to whether a drug-testing program can be in
place in the Carthage district for the coming school year.

A majority of the board favors a proposal for drug testing, but members are
divided on whether there is time to develop and implement a program by the
time the school year starts Aug. 18, said Neel Baucom, board president.

And, as a result of Thursday's court decision, the Carl Junction School
District may "take a strong look" at expanding its testing program this
year, Superintendent Larry Thomas said.

Inclusion

The program being considered in Carthage is based on one that started in
Carl Junction for the 1999-2000 school year.

"It's a board decision, but I think we would look at expanding it to all
competitive activities, because we think what we've done has been
successful," Thomas said. "Since we have a program in place, it wouldn't be
like we were starting all over."

Baucom and Gary Reed, Carthage superintendent, said the decision by the
high court would allow Carthage to include more students in a testing program.

"We need to get further clarification, but it appears the decision opens
the door to broaden the testing," Reed said. "It assists the board and
administration in addressing the single biggest concern we've heard from
parents and the community in relation to the proposal."

Parents who have questioned the Carthage proposal have complained that it
would target athletes. School officials want the program to be as inclusive
as possible, Baucom said.

"I'm hoping that all parents will step up and ask us to include their
children," he said. "That would open it up even more and be a better cross
section. And I'm hoping that I can be one of the first ones tested. We all
need to step up."

But crafting a program to be as inclusive as possible is, for Baucom, an
argument against trying to start it for the next school year.

"I want to make sure everything is in place and that the program affects
everyone equally," he said. "We thought about starting a program in this
year, for spring sports. But then we'd have people saying we ignored fall
sports."

Broader testing

Drug testing for student athletes has been allowed since a 1995 Supreme
Court ruling.

Thursday's 5-4 decision would allow the broadest drug testing the court has
permitted for students whom authorities have no particular reason to
suspect of wrongdoing. It applies to students who join competitive
after-school activities or teams, a category that includes many if not most
middle school and high school students.

"We find that testing students who participate in extracurricular
activities is a reasonably effective means of addressing the school
district's legitimate concerns in preventing, deterring and detecting drug
use," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for himself, Chief Justice William H.
Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen Breyer.

The court stopped short of allowing random tests for any student,
regardless of whether the student is involved in extracurricular
activities. But several justices have indicated they are interested in
answering that question at some point.

The court ruled against a former Oklahoma high school honor student who
competed on an academic quiz team and sang in the choir. Lindsay Earls, a
self-described "goody-two-shoes," tested negative but sued over what she
called a humiliating and accusatory policy.

"I find it very disappointing that the court would find it reasonable to
drug-test students when all the experts, from pediatricians to teachers,
say that drug testing is counterproductive," said Graham Boyd, director of
drug policy litigation with the American Civil Liberties Union and Earls'
lawyer.

'Invasion of privacy'

The Pottawatomie County, Okla., school system had considered testing all
students. Instead, it settled for testing only those involved in
competitive extracurricular activities on the theory that by voluntarily
representing the school, those students had a lower expectation of privacy
than did students at large.

"We are not opposed to drug tests, but when we have situations where they
are done in a suspicionless situation, we believe that is an invasion of
privacy," said Bob Chase, president of the National Education Association,
a teachers union. "If there is suspicion of drug use, that is quite another
story, but in this case it was not."

The NEA filed a brief opposing the Oklahoma district's testing policy.

The ruling is a follow-up to a 1995 case in which the court allowed random
urine tests for student athletes. In that case, the court found that the
school had a pervasive drug problem and that athletes were among the users.
The court also found that athletes had less expectation of privacy.

Thursday's ruling is the logical next step, the Oklahoma school district
and its backers said, and the court majority agreed.

"The particular testing program upheld today is not reasonable, it is
capricious, even perverse," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent
for herself and Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor and David
Souter.

In a brief, separate dissent, O'Connor and Souter said they disagreed with
the court's ruling in 1995 and that they disagree now.

Of the estimated 14 million American high school students, more than 50
percent probably participate in some form of organized after-school
activity, educators say. The trend is toward greater extracurricular
participation, largely because colleges consider it a factor in admissions.

Numerous schools installed drug-testing programs for athletes after the
1995 ruling, but wider drug testing remains relatively rare among the
nation's 15,500 public school districts. Lower courts have reached
differing conclusions about the practice.

The Tecumseh, Okla., testing program ran for part of two school years,
beginning in 1998. It was suspended after Earls and another student sued.
Earls is now a student at Dartmouth College.

The Tecumseh policy covered a range of voluntary clubs and sports,
including the Future Farmers of America club, cheerleading and football.
Students were tested at the beginning of the school year. Thereafter, tests
were random.

Overall, 505 high school students were tested for drug use. Three students,
all of them athletes, tested positive.

A federal appeals court ruled against the program, saying it took the
Supreme Court's 1995 ruling too far. Sports are different from other
extracurricular activities, the lower court said, and the school had not
done enough to show that students who participated in those activities were
abusing drugs.