School drug tests get tougher

Warren County students may soon find it a bit harder to avoid, or tamper with, drug tests when two new policies are put in place by the school system.

Currently, only students involved in extracurricular activities can be drug tested. The program began with students involved in athletic teams, but was expanded to include any school-sponsored extracurricular activity after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June, 2002 specifically allowed random drug testing of students participating in other extracurricular activities such as band, National Honor Society and Future Farmers of America.

Beginning with the 2003-2004 school year, all Warren County students in grades 7-12 wishing to participate in any school-sponsored activity were required to submit to random testing. Refusal to do so results in expulsion from the school-sponsored athletic team, club or activity.

At last week?s school board meeting, human resources director Roy Pierce, who has taken over responsibility for the random drug testing program, advised the school board to go with the system-wide drug testing bid from PSI, which had handled the testing for the 2005-2006 school year.

The board voted unanimously to approve PSI?s bid, which came in without an increase in testing charges over the previous year, keeping the price per test at $18.50.

PSI will also oversee random testing of school bus drivers as part of federal safety requirements for transportation. Drivers were previously required to travel to Woodbury for testing.

Currently the drug testing policy for teachers is still under negotiation, according to Director of Schools Dr. Jerry Hale. School board member Mike Holland has asked that teachers agree to be randomly tested, but this idea has been met with fierce opposition from the teacher?s union.

?The contract is on hold, actually until we get a budget,? Hale said. ?Then we?ll go back to the table. That issue and the monetary items were the areas that were not agreed upon.?

One of the concerns schools have had with the student drug testing method currently in place is the time away from class generated by the testing, which has been traditionally performed with urine samples. Apparently some students have been claiming an inability to provide samples, resulting in a situation where testing personnel were required to wait until the student could urinate. PSI has come up with a viable solution for that problem, according to Pierce. The method utilizes an oral swab to collect a sample for the test.

?When a child can?t provide a sample for a urine test, PSI has agreed to do a saliva test,? Pierce said. ?So they would be able to send them back and keep them in class instead of having them out for a couple of hours like they were a lot of times.?

Holland asked how the saliva test works.

?If they come out and say, ?Well, I just can?t go,? you swab them and send them back to class?? asked Holland.

?Right,? said Pierce. ?You give them a few minutes to try the other, because the saliva test is a little more expensive, but they have agreed to do it for the same price.?

Another issue has been the possibility of contamination, since students aren?t directly supervised while providing the sample. This situation gives students the opportunity to dilute the sample with toilet water. One solution suggested to prevent that was to introduce a blue dye into the water in the toilet prior to the sample.

?That?s what we want to do,? said Pierce. ?That?s an automatic cue the sample has been diluted.?

The board agreed this would be an effective method to discourage students from diluting samples.