Beatrice School Board could decide drug testing issue in November

BEATRICE – A southeast Nebraska School District could decide the fate of its student random drug testing policy, next month.  Beatrice Public Schools administrators and board members held another committee-level discussion of the testing, required for high school students participating in athletics or activities. Superintendent Jason Alexander said the question is whether random drug testing is effective.

School board members are trying to decide whether to keep the program…. in place now not quite ten years…end it….or revise the policy. Board President Eric Trusty is not in favor of continuing the program.

"But, I would entertain, maybe an alternative to that, to where if there potentially was a suspect of a student athlete or somebody in any extracurricular activity by any staff member or whoever that may be, then if the parent consented to testing, then they were tested. Some sort of disciplinary policy is written that says if this happens, if you're found to be using, then you're out for a certain period of time."

The company that does the testing for BPS is led by former Nebraska State Patrol Superintendent Tom Nesbitt, who has defended it as a deterrent to substance use. But board members like Charles Riedesul who has researched papers on the issue, wonders about such programs’ effectiveness and whether there’s a better way to keep students away from substance abuse.

"None of them address drug testing and the effectiveness of it. The papers were all focused on the correlation between being engaged in activities and sports in particular...and substance abuse. The most that it seemed to show is that it's inconsistent between different sports. It really, to me, did not answer the question as to the effectiveness of testing."

Riedesul said he’d rather see BPS invest in programs that achieve long-term results in substance abuse prevention. Board member Doris Martin favors putting a pause on the current program, providing time to study possible revisions to the policy. High School Principal Jason Sutter says there’s another option…..relying on the school’s code of conduct for all students, spelled out in student handbooks.

"We could have a student tomorrow that had come to school and the teacher had become concerned that they're acting differently in class, or they smelled of alcohol...and we go through a process of talking to that student....and if we need to get our school resource officer involved. We've got things in our code of conduct about what happens, what consequences we have in place if the student violates our code of conduct."

Superintendent Jason Alexander said it’s the duty of the district to investigate if there’s reasonable suspicion a student is under the influence of a substance.
"Randomized drug testing, in order to really be effective is going to require us to test more, than we do already. It's going to require us to test more students. It's going to require us to probably include the three most utilized drugs of alcohol, nicotine...and THC. It's going to require us to test more often. I think those are the things that you might see in an improved effectiveness rate. But, even in the study that was provided, 3,476 students that were told they were going to be tested over the course of the study, there were 38 positive tests during that time period, which is a one-percent rate."

The random drug testing program program costs BPS about $5,000 per year but is on a pay-as-you-go approach, based on the number of random drug tests given. There’s been relatively few positive test results.