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."
Showing posts with label drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drugs. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Search the Teachers?
From Hawaii, and then Detroit, by way of the Philadelphia Examiner
DISCLAIMER: This article is presented for information, discussion, and reflection ONLY. It does not suggest the absence or presence of any drug related activity within the Morrisville School District.
Here's a twist to the drug-sniffing dogs that routinely patrol our schools protecting the children.
What about the teachers and staff? Should they get doggie-sniffed and be subject to random searches of their work spaces? Is it an "age" thing, because the students are minors and we the adults are protecting them in loco parentis? But, you protest, 18 year old students get searched too.
What a tangled web we weave...
Will teachers be drug tested in Hawaii and other states?
December 28, 11:36 PM by Donna Gundle-Krieg, Detroit Education Examiner
Do you think that Michigan teachers would ever accept 11% pay raises in return for allowing random drug testing?
That's just what teachers in Hawaii did, and now they are fighting the random tests as illegal violation of their privacy rights.
The sticky point seems to be the definition of random. The teachers' union defines random" as "limited to a pool of teachers who go on field trips, work with disabled children, are frequently absent or have criminal records."
On the other hand, the school district wants to have the power to decide when the random tests will occur.
In 2007, 61% of the teachers agreed to the contract giving them pay hikes in exchange for this loss of privacy.
The new contract mean that new teachers now earn $43,157 per year, while teachers with more than 33 years of experience earn $79,170 a year.
The drug testing section of the Hawaii agreement was spurred because during a recent six month period, the Education Department had six employees that were arrested in drug cases, included a special education teacher who pled guilty to selling more than $40,000 worth of crystal methamphetamine to an undercover agent.
These drug taking teachers are unusual. According to the Associated Press, about 4% of teachers nationwide reported using illegal drugs. This is among the lowest rates of any profession.
Only a handful of school districts in the nation require drug testing for teachers.
The Hawaii Labor Relations Board will vote on this issue soon, and the American Civil Liberties Union has said it plans to sue the state claiming the program violates privacy rights, costs taxpayers too much money, and does little to curb drug use.
Personally I agree that drug testing is not necessary unless it's warranted.
My many years of experience in Human Resources taught me that the most resourceful drug users know how to beat the tests. In addition, many of the most dangerous drugs leave a person's system quickly, while marijuana stays in the body for months.
However, the teachers voted on this contract and received a hefty pay raise for the agreement. They can't have it both ways.
DISCLAIMER: This article is presented for information, discussion, and reflection ONLY. It does not suggest the absence or presence of any drug related activity within the Morrisville School District.
Here's a twist to the drug-sniffing dogs that routinely patrol our schools protecting the children.
What about the teachers and staff? Should they get doggie-sniffed and be subject to random searches of their work spaces? Is it an "age" thing, because the students are minors and we the adults are protecting them in loco parentis? But, you protest, 18 year old students get searched too.
What a tangled web we weave...
Will teachers be drug tested in Hawaii and other states?
December 28, 11:36 PM by Donna Gundle-Krieg, Detroit Education Examiner
Do you think that Michigan teachers would ever accept 11% pay raises in return for allowing random drug testing?
That's just what teachers in Hawaii did, and now they are fighting the random tests as illegal violation of their privacy rights.
The sticky point seems to be the definition of random. The teachers' union defines random" as "limited to a pool of teachers who go on field trips, work with disabled children, are frequently absent or have criminal records."
On the other hand, the school district wants to have the power to decide when the random tests will occur.
In 2007, 61% of the teachers agreed to the contract giving them pay hikes in exchange for this loss of privacy.
The new contract mean that new teachers now earn $43,157 per year, while teachers with more than 33 years of experience earn $79,170 a year.
The drug testing section of the Hawaii agreement was spurred because during a recent six month period, the Education Department had six employees that were arrested in drug cases, included a special education teacher who pled guilty to selling more than $40,000 worth of crystal methamphetamine to an undercover agent.
These drug taking teachers are unusual. According to the Associated Press, about 4% of teachers nationwide reported using illegal drugs. This is among the lowest rates of any profession.
Only a handful of school districts in the nation require drug testing for teachers.
The Hawaii Labor Relations Board will vote on this issue soon, and the American Civil Liberties Union has said it plans to sue the state claiming the program violates privacy rights, costs taxpayers too much money, and does little to curb drug use.
Personally I agree that drug testing is not necessary unless it's warranted.
My many years of experience in Human Resources taught me that the most resourceful drug users know how to beat the tests. In addition, many of the most dangerous drugs leave a person's system quickly, while marijuana stays in the body for months.
However, the teachers voted on this contract and received a hefty pay raise for the agreement. They can't have it both ways.
Monday, August 25, 2008
More Student Testing
From the BCCT this morning.
I'm not necessarily against this idea, yet where does it end? Are the teachers, staff and administrators tested as well? Perhaps the school board should be as well. How about the parents? Should they all set an example?
“This is all about getting help. If we can save one or two kids ... what price do you want to put on a kid’s life?” Ask the Emperor and the Board of Selected Accomplices. They apparently have numbers on this topic.
The privacy issue looms large here as well. Who gets this information and how is it used?
The endpoint? Magic 8-ball says "ask again": “The success question is difficult to get a handle on.” If the question is that difficult to frame, the answer must be pretty impossible.
Do you trust the people in charge?
District considers drug testing
Central Bucks administrators plan to have more meetings with parents and students this fall to discuss a random testing program. Here’s a look at other schools in Pennsylvania that have similar programs.
By CHRISTINA KRISTOFIC
Central Bucks School District administrators are planning to meet with parents and students this fall to discuss a random student-drug testing program.
If district administrators decide to implement a drug-testing program, they won’t be the first in the state.
And they probably won’t be the last.
No state agency keeps track of how many of the state’s 501 school districts have student drug-testing programs, but the newspaper identified 12 school districts across the state, although none in Bucks or eastern Montgomery counties, that have programs in place. Some are new; some are several years old. Officials from only five districts responded to inquiries about their testing programs.
Officials at school districts with established programs said they have successfully reduced student drug use, even though they didn’t have much data to support the claim.
Others said they didn’t know if student drug use had dropped. But they thought the programs have effectively helped students who use drugs to get the counseling they need from school nurses and drug counselors and given students who don’t use drugs another way to say “no” to someone who offers drugs to them.
“There is a problem with drug use,” said Barbara Zimmerman, a member of the Hempfield school board in Lancaster County.
“Anybody in a school district that says they don’t have a drug problem is lying or they aren’t connected with reality. There’s drugs in schools. No matter what way you look at it. It might be on school grounds. It might be on the weekends.”
And Zimmerman, a registered nurse and nursing instructor at Millersville University, believes schools have the responsibility to help kids by testing them. She advocated for the program at Hempfield.
“What’s the difference from when the school nurse is screening your hearing, vision, height, weight? The same thing happens as if you fail your hearing test. What happens? You send a letter home and you’ve got to get a hearing test,” she said. “This is all about getting help. If we can save one or two kids ... what price do you want to put on a kid’s life?”
Asked if the program had reduced drug use at Hempfield in the three years that the district has had it, Zimmerman answered, “The success question is difficult to get a handle on.”
She acknowledged that much of the data school districts have is self-reported — student responses to statewide surveys about drug and alcohol use.
Fewer students at Hempfield have reported using drugs and alcohol, she said.
Zimmerman said she gives the high school students a written survey at the end of every school year, asking if they think there’s a drug problem at Hempfield, if they think the drug-testing program helps them say “no” to the peers and if they chose not to participate in extracurricular activities because of the drug-testing program.
The survey has a portion where students can write their own thoughts, and Zimmerman said most of the students have said they think the drug-testing program has helped curtail drug use at Hempfield.
“Are they saying it because they think they have to say it? Or are they saying it because it’s true?” she asked.
Gettysburg Area School District Superintendent William Hall said earlier this year that he didn’t know much about the success of the district’s drug-testing program because he’s still new to the district. The district has tested all student-athletes for three or four years, he said.
“We’re not seeing any alarming increases,” Hall said. “But I can’t say that we’re seeing any significant decreases, either.”
Solanco School District in southern Lancaster County has had a random student drug-testing program in place for several years. It received federal funding three years ago to pay for its program and has continued to fund the program out of its own budget for the last two years.
More than 60 percent of the middle and high school students were in the testing pool last year, and a “vast majority” of their tests came back negative for drug use, said district spokesman Keith Kaufman. Asked if the program has successfully reduced drug use at Solanco, Kaufman couldn’t really say.
“What the drug testing program does is that it gives our students another opportunity to say ‘no’ to drug use,” he said.
“If they’re getting any kind of peer pressure, they can say, ‘Listen, I want to be in the band. I want to be on the chess team. I want to be on the football team. I can’t risk it. I don’t want to lose my parking privileges.’ That’s a big one. Once students start driving, they don’t like the idea of going back to a school bus.”
And, when students test positive for drug use, they can get help from counselors.
Candis Finan, superintendent of Delaware Valley School District in Pike County, was able to provide a little more data about the success of her district’s drug-testing program.
Delaware Valley School District has had a student drug-testing program since 1998, shortly after a student was caught in the high school parking lot with heroin.
The school district has one of the most comprehensive student drug-testing programs of the school districts surveyed. Students in seventh through 12th grades who participate in extracurricular activities and students who drive to school must submit to drug testing.
All of the students who drive or participate in yearlong activities are tested at the beginning of the school year. Students who participate in seasonal activities are tested at the beginning of the season. And all of the students in the testing pool are tested randomly throughout the year.
Finan said the district tested 1,600 students in 2007-08 school year, and nine tested positive for drug use. The district tested 1,400 students in the 2006-07 school year, and four tested positive.
In all the years the district has had the drug-testing program, Finan said, only one student has ever tested positive a second time.
Finan said the students who participate in extracurricular activities and drive to school are the leaders of the school; and by their refusal to use drugs, they become role models for the others.
“I believe it works. I believe it is clearly a deterrent to student drug use,” Finan said.
“Is [drug use] going down? I wouldn’t have figures to support that. The students who wish to participate in activities clearly are not using drugs, I can tell you that.”
I'm not necessarily against this idea, yet where does it end? Are the teachers, staff and administrators tested as well? Perhaps the school board should be as well. How about the parents? Should they all set an example?
“This is all about getting help. If we can save one or two kids ... what price do you want to put on a kid’s life?” Ask the Emperor and the Board of Selected Accomplices. They apparently have numbers on this topic.
The privacy issue looms large here as well. Who gets this information and how is it used?
The endpoint? Magic 8-ball says "ask again": “The success question is difficult to get a handle on.” If the question is that difficult to frame, the answer must be pretty impossible.
Do you trust the people in charge?
District considers drug testing
Central Bucks administrators plan to have more meetings with parents and students this fall to discuss a random testing program. Here’s a look at other schools in Pennsylvania that have similar programs.
By CHRISTINA KRISTOFIC
Central Bucks School District administrators are planning to meet with parents and students this fall to discuss a random student-drug testing program.
If district administrators decide to implement a drug-testing program, they won’t be the first in the state.
And they probably won’t be the last.
No state agency keeps track of how many of the state’s 501 school districts have student drug-testing programs, but the newspaper identified 12 school districts across the state, although none in Bucks or eastern Montgomery counties, that have programs in place. Some are new; some are several years old. Officials from only five districts responded to inquiries about their testing programs.
Officials at school districts with established programs said they have successfully reduced student drug use, even though they didn’t have much data to support the claim.
Others said they didn’t know if student drug use had dropped. But they thought the programs have effectively helped students who use drugs to get the counseling they need from school nurses and drug counselors and given students who don’t use drugs another way to say “no” to someone who offers drugs to them.
“There is a problem with drug use,” said Barbara Zimmerman, a member of the Hempfield school board in Lancaster County.
“Anybody in a school district that says they don’t have a drug problem is lying or they aren’t connected with reality. There’s drugs in schools. No matter what way you look at it. It might be on school grounds. It might be on the weekends.”
And Zimmerman, a registered nurse and nursing instructor at Millersville University, believes schools have the responsibility to help kids by testing them. She advocated for the program at Hempfield.
“What’s the difference from when the school nurse is screening your hearing, vision, height, weight? The same thing happens as if you fail your hearing test. What happens? You send a letter home and you’ve got to get a hearing test,” she said. “This is all about getting help. If we can save one or two kids ... what price do you want to put on a kid’s life?”
Asked if the program had reduced drug use at Hempfield in the three years that the district has had it, Zimmerman answered, “The success question is difficult to get a handle on.”
She acknowledged that much of the data school districts have is self-reported — student responses to statewide surveys about drug and alcohol use.
Fewer students at Hempfield have reported using drugs and alcohol, she said.
Zimmerman said she gives the high school students a written survey at the end of every school year, asking if they think there’s a drug problem at Hempfield, if they think the drug-testing program helps them say “no” to the peers and if they chose not to participate in extracurricular activities because of the drug-testing program.
The survey has a portion where students can write their own thoughts, and Zimmerman said most of the students have said they think the drug-testing program has helped curtail drug use at Hempfield.
“Are they saying it because they think they have to say it? Or are they saying it because it’s true?” she asked.
Gettysburg Area School District Superintendent William Hall said earlier this year that he didn’t know much about the success of the district’s drug-testing program because he’s still new to the district. The district has tested all student-athletes for three or four years, he said.
“We’re not seeing any alarming increases,” Hall said. “But I can’t say that we’re seeing any significant decreases, either.”
Solanco School District in southern Lancaster County has had a random student drug-testing program in place for several years. It received federal funding three years ago to pay for its program and has continued to fund the program out of its own budget for the last two years.
More than 60 percent of the middle and high school students were in the testing pool last year, and a “vast majority” of their tests came back negative for drug use, said district spokesman Keith Kaufman. Asked if the program has successfully reduced drug use at Solanco, Kaufman couldn’t really say.
“What the drug testing program does is that it gives our students another opportunity to say ‘no’ to drug use,” he said.
“If they’re getting any kind of peer pressure, they can say, ‘Listen, I want to be in the band. I want to be on the chess team. I want to be on the football team. I can’t risk it. I don’t want to lose my parking privileges.’ That’s a big one. Once students start driving, they don’t like the idea of going back to a school bus.”
And, when students test positive for drug use, they can get help from counselors.
Candis Finan, superintendent of Delaware Valley School District in Pike County, was able to provide a little more data about the success of her district’s drug-testing program.
Delaware Valley School District has had a student drug-testing program since 1998, shortly after a student was caught in the high school parking lot with heroin.
The school district has one of the most comprehensive student drug-testing programs of the school districts surveyed. Students in seventh through 12th grades who participate in extracurricular activities and students who drive to school must submit to drug testing.
All of the students who drive or participate in yearlong activities are tested at the beginning of the school year. Students who participate in seasonal activities are tested at the beginning of the season. And all of the students in the testing pool are tested randomly throughout the year.
Finan said the district tested 1,600 students in 2007-08 school year, and nine tested positive for drug use. The district tested 1,400 students in the 2006-07 school year, and four tested positive.
In all the years the district has had the drug-testing program, Finan said, only one student has ever tested positive a second time.
Finan said the students who participate in extracurricular activities and drive to school are the leaders of the school; and by their refusal to use drugs, they become role models for the others.
“I believe it works. I believe it is clearly a deterrent to student drug use,” Finan said.
“Is [drug use] going down? I wouldn’t have figures to support that. The students who wish to participate in activities clearly are not using drugs, I can tell you that.”
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