Supervision or Snoopervision?

From the BCCT.

Officials discussing student drug testing
By CHRISTINA KRISTOFIC

A decision may come before the end of the school year.

Central Bucks School District psychologists have spent the past three months meeting with focus groups to discuss the possibility of implementing a random student drug testing program.

They will continue the meetings through March and school district administrators will likely share the information with the school board in late spring. Superintendent N. Robert Laws said this week, "We just don't know yet how we're going to do this and if we're going to do it."

"We're coming on this at a time when our budget doesn't allow for a lot of frills, either," he said. "This isn't free. We're going to have to contract with a lab. No matter how much you invest in it, if you save a life, it's worth it."

Central Bucks has lost graduates to drug overdose in recent years. Jeramiah Seger and John H. Warren IV, both graduates of CB East, overdosed in 2006 on heroin laced with fentanyl. And Kyle Houck, a CB West graduate, overdosed on heroin about a year later.

Laws said the decision to discuss random student drug testing wasn't directly related to those deaths, but they were an influence.

"The unfortunate part is when you deal with young people, there are always cases," he said. "The motivation for us is that we want to put everything in place we can to help students make better decisions. A lot of kids tell us that if they know they might have to pee in a cup and they never know when that's coming, that's a deterrent."

School district officials started talking last spring about implementing a voluntary random student drug testing program in the high schools. They brought Christina Steffner, principal of Hunterdon Central Regional High School in New Jersey and an advocate for random student drug testing, to speak about how drug testing has worked at her school. And they surveyed parents.

The drug testing discussion was put on hold over the summer months and resumed in the fall with the focus groups. Laws said school administrators have met with "just about anyone who would talk to us," including officials from other schools, chiefs of police and business leaders.

Students from Hunterdon Central Regional High School will come to Doylestown early in March to share their thoughts on random student drug testing with students at Central Bucks.

If school officials decide to pursue a random student drug testing program, school officials will also have to research the legality of such a program, negotiate a contract with a lab, seek funding (Laws said the district will apply for grants) and draft a policy to be approved by the school board.

"At this point, I don't know what I'll even be recommending to the board," Laws said. "We want this to be something the community wants us to do. We don't want it to be talked down. We don't want it to be something we're forcing on people. If it's a benefit to keep the kids clean, then we'll provide it as a service."

Laws believes a random student drug testing program could be good for the community if the community wants it.

He said, "It's not about supervision or snoopervision; it's about getting into our kids' lives and protecting them."