Anyone interested in protecting their children’s rights should attend the June 18 Upper Freehold Regional Board of Education meeting where the merits of a random drug testing policy for high school students in extracurricular activities will be discussed and voted on.
The school district is following the lead of two questionable U.S. Supreme Court rulings in 1995 and 2002 that found drug testing does not violate a student’s Fourth Amendment rights to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches because schools have a responsibility to protect the health and wellbeing of the student population. These rulings are flimsy, arguing that students in extracurricular activities have less of a legitimate privacy interest because “school sports are not for the bashful” and “there is an element of communal undress inherent” in athletic and other extracurricular activities. Civil libertarians continue to challenge these positions, which is the first reason we implore residents to weigh in on whether the school district should enter this gray area.
Furthermore, school districts that implement random drug testing have to meet certain criteria set forth in those rulings, and we’re not totally convinced the local district has. Districts have to present an immediate, legitimate concern in preventing drug use among its students and evidence of a drug problem.
According to the Upper Freehold Regional School District’s annual report on violence, vandalism and substanceabuse incidents, there were eight incidents involving substance abuse in the schools last year, which is 11 less than in 2005-06. The report notes that 22 students had been sent for drug screenings in 2006-07, 10 of whom tested positive. The previous year’s report stated that seven students had been screened, with four testing positive, and in 2004-05, 37 students were screened and eight tested positive. There are about 1,151 in grades 9-12.
School officials argue that random drug testing will deter drug use, but there are just as many studies that say it does as there are those that say it does not. Even the Committee on Substance Abuse and the Council on School Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2007 called for more rigorous scientific evaluation to determine if such testing is effective in curbing drug use and to evaluate possible harm.
The harm in random drug testing is that it can indirectly encourage students to use more alcohol and drugs when athletic seasons or extracurricular activities end and to use more dangerous and harmful drugs that can be excreted from the body faster than cannabis. Students can also resort to using harmful methods of trying to flush out their bodies to cheat a urine test.
We also encourage the school district to consider that most “random testing” procedures are open to legal challenge because it often cannot be proved that a testing subject was not targeted. There’s also the question of whether or not such a policy violates the nation’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards for which even the White House had no answer.
We believe the school district should help protect the wellbeing of students by strictly enforcing its for-cause drug policy, which is already in place and allows for the testing of students who are visually intoxicated or suspected of using. The schools should also focus the funding it would use for random testing as well as its grant-obtaining and fundraising efforts toward more extracurricular activities and additional resources for kids who may be in trouble. Help parents become better informed, continually review and update drug assistance counseling at the high school level, help teachers and staff better identify problem behaviors for early intervention, refer troubled students to health care professionals, and strengthen the partnership with the community’s two existing drug alliances. The board could also try implementing a voluntary drug testing program to truly gauge the community’s interest.
The board should also consider that expending district funds for random drug testing would reduce those for other more effective deterrents, not to mention other school programs, staff and books, which the school district already has problems funding adequately.
Even though we know there is a drug and alcohol problem in our society, we do not allow police to randomly stop people on the streets to see if they have drugs, and the school district should follow the same code of conduct. Yes, it’s a shame that so many youths die from alcoholand drug-related accidents each year, but the school district should not have the sole responsibility of trying to save them, especially at the expense of civil liberties.