Thursday, Jul. 14 2011 5:39PM
Drug-testing policy creates buzz here: Random testing to begin in Raytown School District this fall
By Rob Roberts
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ReprintThe Raytown School District publicized a recent survey of self-reported drug abuse among its 10th graders to help win community support for the random-drug-testing policy approved by its school board on Monday.
Next door in the Lee’s Summit R-7 School District, a similar survey indicates an even greater level of student drug abuse. However, school officials here are not ready to start springing pop urine exams on R-7 high school students.
“That is a topic we have really never broached…” said Jack Wiley, president of the Lee’s Summit R-7 school board. “Personally, I would be in favor of anything that gives kids one more reason not to do drugs. But in budget times like this, spending on anything not directly related to education is kind of a difficult argument to make.”
On Monday, the Raytown Board of Education voted 6-0 adopted a drug-testing policy that will cost up to $25,000 a year.
Cathy Allie, community relations coordinator for the Raytown district, said the policy creates a random testing pool including all ninth through 12th graders at Raytown and Raytown South high schools who participate in extracurricular activities or have permits to park in the schools’ lots.
The rationale for including those two groups was to create a pool that includes well more than half of the 2,500 high school students in the district, Allie said.
“In districts where more than 50 percent of students are tested, results on future (student drug-abuse) surveys improved,” Allie said. “We know that approximately 51 or 52 percent of our students are in extracurricular activities, and by adding the students with parking permits we’re going to have 60 to 65 percent in the testing pool.”
The district, which is preparing to solicit bids from drug-testing firms, expects each test to cost in the neighborhood of $25. That means around 100 students will be selected from the pool for testing each month during the school year. Dr. David McGehee, superintendent of the R-7 school district, said he was philosophically opposed to the idea of a high school testing policy that does not include every student in the testing pool.
Such all-inclusive policies, however, are deemed a violation of civil liberties, said Roby Little, executive director of Lee’s Summit Cares, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing substance abuse.
In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court broadened the authority of public schools to test students, ruling 5-4 that random testing of all middle and high school students participating in extracurricular activities is constitutional. Previously, the court had supported testing only for student athletes.
During two community forums held prior to the adoption of Raytown’s testing policy, Allie said, the only opposition voiced came from patrons who, like McGehee, supported “putting the whole student body in the testing pool.” In addition to lacking legal support, however, “that frankly would be cost-prohibitive for us,” Allie said.
The Raytown school district was forced to make about $3.4 million in cuts to its budget last year, Allie added. But its board and superintendent decided to take on the drug-testing expense after reviewing the “alarming” results of a 2010 drug-use survey conducted by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
According to that survey, 23.7 percent of the Raytown district’s 10th graders reported having used marijuana, compared with just 16.3 percent of 10th graders statewide.
Faced with those and other statistics from the DESE survey, Raytown school board members voted to make their district the first urban district in the Kansas City area to approve random testing for high school students.
About 25 percent of Missouri public school districts have adopted random drug testing. But most of those are small rural districts, including the Sparta and Logan-Rogersville districts, where Dr. Allan Markley served before being named superintendent of Raytown schools.
In the Kansas City area, random testing is currently in place at only two high schools, Oak Grove and O’Hara.
Randy McClain, principal at Oak Grove High, said its policy, like the Raytown district’s, places in the testing pool all ninth through 12th graders that have parking permits or participate in extracurricular activities. And as with the Raytown policy, he added, students not included in one of those groups may be opted in by their parents.
As a result, more than 500 of Oak Grove High’s roughly 650 students are included in the testing pool each year. And of that number, about 15 are selected for testing each month.
“I’ve been principal since we implemented our policy in 2004,” McClain said, “and we’ve always had a minimal number of students testing positive. I’d say three a year is a worst-case scenario.”
The Oak Grove district has not looked at DESE survey scores to determine whether they are trending down as a result of its testing policy, McClain said. But he’s confident the policy acts as a deterrent. Thus, McClain encourages other districts to follow suit.
“But the thing that’s imperative for districts is that they take significant time to educate and communicate before adopting a policy,” McClain said.
Little, of Lee’s Summit Cares, said the “Raytown district did an excellent job working with the community to see if (it) was ready for random drug testing.”
Whether the Lee’s Summit district is ready for a similar discussion remains to be seen. But that’s not to say the district doesn’t care about drug abuse, said Little and board president Wiley. As they noted, the R-7 district supports DARE, after-prom and other programs aimed at reducing and deterring abuse.
