Mathews County

RANDOM DRUG TESTS FOR STUDENTS A BAD IDEA

Recognizing a problem is the first step toward solving it. The Mathews
County School Board recognizes that drugs are a problem in the school system.

But that next step, finding a way to deal with the problem, can trip you up.

The School Board has tentatively agreed to a program of voluntary drug
testing for high school students. The details have to be worked out, and
testing wouldn't begin until the fall. But here, basically, is how the
program would work:

Students and parents would have to agree for the students to be in the
program. Those tested would be chosen randomly from the volunteers. A first
violation would involve no school discipline. For a second offense, the
student would have to attend a drug-treatment program at his or her
expense. Parents would be notified if their child didn't want to be in the
program or refused to submit to the urine test.

Students would be given incentives to volunteer, such as free parking
permits or free admission to athletic events.

The hope, obviously, is that the combination of parental pressure and
incentives would get a large pool of volunteers and that the chance of
getting caught would deter students from using drugs. They'd also have a
positive "crutch" on which to lean if caught in circumstances where drugs
were being used. The possibility of being tested would be an excuse for
saying "no" to an offer to use marijuana or some other drug.

School officials have obviously given some thought to trying to devise a
program that's legal, doesn't discriminate against any single group of
students, such as athletes, and that's focused on helping, not punishing,
students. All of this is commendable, but ...

There's another lesson being taught by this program: that it's "normal" to
be subjected to random tests -- random searches, really, of that most
personal of possessions, your own body. The lesson is that if you aren't
willing to go along with this, you're suspect. Maybe you're doing drugs.
Maybe you're not a team player. But whatever it is, it's not good.

This is not a lesson schools should be teaching. Searches, especially
searches of bodily fluids, should be the exception, not the norm. Schools
should teach that important civic lesson, not undermine it.

Here's an alternative. Make the drug testing available to those families
who feel they need it, but take away the incentives, the peer pressure and
the normalization of searches.

That makes the decision about whether to test more personal and more
private, yet it still strengthens the school system's partnership with
families in the battle against drugs.