If approved by the Royal Oak School District Board, drug testing could be issued for students as young as 6th grade.
For most students, what they do outside of class will never be known to school faculty.
But a proposed policy in a nearby local school district could start a trend of blurring this separation that may reach Seaholm students.
Royal Oak School District’s Board of Education will vote on a proposed voluntary drug testing program in May that could allow for all students from 6th to 12th grade to be tested.If approved, at the beginning of next year a letter will be sent home asking parents and students if they want to participate in the program. The letter will need to be signed by both a parent and the student and they can choose to participate or not. This will help, many supporters feel, to start a conversion about drugs between parents and students.
“The intent,” said Thomas Moline, superintendent of Royal Oak Schools, “is to give parents another tool to deal with the potential of students experimenting or using illegal substances.”
The tests and the following communication with the parents will be done by Beaumont Hospital.
“The school district would be a gateway in terms of taking in the enrollees and generating the random lists for occasional testing,” said Moline.
If a student tests positive the parents will be told directly in a phone call.
“The school doesn’t see any information on the results,” assured Moline.
Moline added that a “black list” of students who denied the test will not be made furthering the districts hands-off approach.
The program is modeled after a similar program in the Capistrano Unified School District in Southern California which requires the same parent-student agreement and has the same off site testing.
This program has been in place for six years and has had a great impact on the student body. In a survey of 900 students, 400 students who were enrolled said they used the program to say no to drugs. 15% of students said they quit using drugs after being enrolled.
Even though the program has been working in California and several parents and students are behind Royal Oaks proposal not everyone is a fan. One such group is the ACLU and they feel this new policy is questionable.
“For the school to be involved to this degree is absolutely unconstitutional,” said the legal director of the Oakland Country branch of the ACLU, Elsa Shartsis.
In order to have a drug test the authorities have to have reasonable suspicion explained Shartsis.
“So when one hears the term random drug test [it] should tell you right away that they don’t suspect any one person,” Shartsis said.
Royal Oak schools avoided this problem by making the test voluntary.
However, the ACLU is concerned that the very act of signing the letter to avoid testing could lead to coercion, pressure to participate in the program because of fear of denied drug test being on record.
This could make the tests not so voluntary.
“It’s not that I’m for drug use,” Shartsis concluded. “There’s other ways to deal with this.”
Some students also don’t agree with a similar policy at Seaholm.
“I wouldn’t like it at all,” said Senior Matt Reffino, “[it] shows they don’t have trust for you.”
As for Seaholm, a similar approach toward drug testing is not likely to happen anytime soon.
“I can tell you that we have not thought of doing (drug tests)…at this time,” Seaholm Assistant Principal Deb Boyer said. “I would not want to give you an absolute because life changes, I never thought we would do lock down drills.”
Boyer said that in order to enact a policy like this the support of the parent community would be needed.
“At this point in time,” Mrs. Boyer explained, “my thought is that the parent community would be appalled at us for even thinking about it.”
“The other thing that worries me,” Boyer pointed out, “is how do you keep track of which kids you can (test) and which kids you can’t?”
Boyer said that strategies would be needed to be developed for “the students that you can’t (test) but you really feel are (doing drugs).” This would create “layers and layers of students to sift though all the time.”
“[Such a] policy would be very difficult to maintain,” Boyer said.
