It was an interesting athletics meeting this evening. Parents of students in all sports, plus other activities considered extracurricular, such as Band and Science Olympiad, are being asked to sign a permission slip so their student could be radomly drug tested. It sounds like if this form isn't signed, the student won't be allowed to participate.
There were a lot of questions from the parents in attendance. My sense was that this blindsided most of them, even though the school board had apparently addressed the issue back in October 2008. This seems like another example of poor communication between parents and administrators, and yet another reason to get this blog up and running.
Some of the points that I could hear that sounded interesting included one asking whether or not coaches, teachers or administrators would also be randomly drug tested. (The answer was "no.") Other comments were along the lines of why not randomly test from the entire student population, not just kids involved in extracurricular activities. (I didn't really hear an answer to that question.) It was also pointed out that in such a small community people had a pretty good idea of who was doing what, yet those kids were not tested unless a teacher actually saw them doing drugs. My brief Google search found this site: http://www.drugabuse.gov/drugpages/testingfaqs.html which says that if a student "exhibits physical symptoms of being under the influence, and has patterns of abnormal or erratic behavior" testing could be implemented. So my question would be is the school actually applying a more limited interpretation of drug testing than they have to?
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