Board to Reconsider Random Drug Test Policy

The Board of Education intends to revisit its random drug testing policy to establish whether the three-year-old practice is necessary.

The board gave the charge to its Education Committee, at the request of board member Greg Gillette.

Gillette noted that the board has not seen a report on the random drug testing program in over a year, after the federal grant that funded the program expired.

Gillette would prefer to see the report every year—and review the program’s efficacy.

“It was really my expectation as a board member that we would see that report every year,” he said. “More than that it was my expectation as board member that after the grant was finished that we would review random drug testing as a team.

“I’d like someone to bring up the idea that we change our random drug test policy to give it a sunset date of June 30 2012,” he said. “ .  .  . If that did pass, that would then begin the discussion of having a new policy.”

Though Gillette opposed the policy during its initially vote in February 2008, he noted that the policy could be the same as the current policy—but the board should have a discussion about the policy and whether the district should continue the policy. Any new policy should also have an end date to encourage discussion about continuing it, he added.

“I think this is the only way we’re ever going to get a discussion on whether to continue random drug testing,” Gillette said. “.  .  .I would propose that the new policy also have a sunset date of, say, June 30 2015 so we’re always on top of this.”

Suggesting the discussion likely would not change Gillette’s vote, since he still opposes the policy.

“I think it’s unconstitutional, I don’t think it’s done anything,” he said.  “This was supposed to be a deterrent. It’s not been a deterrent as far as I can tell. It’s only really real effect is to be a deterrent. That’s the only reason to have it. You cannot do enough testing to catch enough kids.”

The district approved its Random Drug Test policy and program in February 2008, after two meetings marked with commentary from high school students, parents, teachers and administrators from other districts, including Hunterdon Central Regional High School.

During those meetings, former Board of Education members John Donnadio and Frank Blandino and Gillette were the only dissenting votes.

The district’s policy is modeled after the Hunterdon Central policy, and states that any student participating in an extra curricular activity, club, sport or who parks on campus is subject to the test.  A computer program selects the candidates randomly and students can be selected more than once in the same year.

The tests involve either mouth swabs or urine screenings, which are administered by the school nurse—the nurse does not, however observe the urine screenings.

Students with positive drug tests are suspended and must undergo a medical exam, and are also removed from extra curricular activities until they complete a preventative education program and submit a clean test.

Several board members supported discussing the policy and voting on whether to update it, keep it or to scrap it. The board has a practice of update its policies on a rotating scale and the discussion would allow the district to cover the updates for that policy, Board President Steven Paget said.

 “I would like to see some evidence that it’s working,” Board member Judy Haas said. “We’ve had this program for three years. It is using staff resources that could be used for some other reasonable function.

Now, this is a budget item like any other budget item,” she added. “I’d like to know if it’s really the most important budget item that we have on the table. That might come back to how many people have been deterred by these process.  We don’t know that.”
“I don’t believe it’s necessary to vote on sunset-ing this,” Marc Rosenberg said. “I think that’s a charge we should give the committee to investigate this.  .  .I would like to hear from Ms. Bingert and some of the other people close to this as to whether or not this is worthwhile or whether this is working.”