Private school to test effect of screening all students for drugs

CHICAGO -- At St. Patrick High School on Chicago's Far West Side, teachers and parents like the image to be clean-cut: no gym shoes, no funny hair colors or body piercings. Dress slacks, a collared shirt, and neatly trimmed hair are the norm.

But tidy as the school seems, these are teenagers, given to peer pressure and temptations. So St. Patrick officials, with the strong backing of parents, unanimously decided this fall to approve drug testing all 990 of its students, putting the all-boys Catholic school in league with a small fraternity of private schools nationwide that are going beyond a Supreme Court ruling allowing public schools to drug test students in athletics or other extracurricular activities.

Beginning next school year, every student will have about 15 hairs snipped 1 1/2 inches, to be tested by Psychemedics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based drug testing company. While some critics contend that hair testing produces too many false positives, the company says it is the surest way to tell how often and how much a student is using because indicators stay in the hair weeks longer than in urine.

The results take up to a week. If it is positive, the student will be called in with his family and counseled. Students with positive results will face a second test within 100 days, as will 25 percent of the student body, picked at random. A student caught twice could face expulsion.

There have been rumblings among students that school officials are stepping over the line. But just as many welcome the testing, according to students and school officials who say it gives students an easy out in the face of strong peer pressure.

"This is a great tool for kids to be able to say no without feeling like a nerd, without saying, `I'm going to get in trouble with my mom and dad,' " said Emmett McGovern, a parent, counselor, and coach at St. Patrick.

David Hibbler, a 15-year-old sophomore at the school, said he has felt the pressure but has always been able to say no. The drug testing will make that simpler, he said. "It allows the students to really focus on their studies and just being a teenager."

Drug testing students has been a contentious issue for years, raising questions about Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure in academic settings.

A study published this year by the University of Michigan, for instance, found very few schools did testing and those that did saw little effect on drug use.

Last year, the US Supreme Court said that, in addition to athletes, students involved in extracurricular activities could be randomly tested at public schools. The ruling stopped short of allowing across-the-board testing, although some legal observers said it could open the door to more widespread testing.

Private schools such as St. Patrick, which do not receive public funding, are not bound by the high court's ruling.

Graham Boyd, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on drug policy and argued last year before the Supreme Court, doubts the high court would endorse mass testing.

Still, Boyd said, the move sets a dangerous tone. "All schools are trying to teach civic lessons about the balance between authority and individual rights, and that school that imposes drug testing is teaching a lesson that violates the balance that the Constitution strikes," he said.

While in Boston recently, White House drug czar John Walters suggested testing in schools could make a dent in drug use. There is no such testing in Massachusetts, said Fatema Gunja, director of the Drug Policy Forum of Massachusetts, although New Bedford's mayor has raised the possibility. Like Boyd, Gunja worries the growth in drug testing could condition students to forfeit certain rights.

St. Patrick, a Christian Brothers school, got the idea from sister schools in Louisiana and Memphis and voted

unanimously in October to adopt the policy. "For the kids that have a little issue, I imagine they're a little nervous," said the St. Patrick principal, Joseph Schmidt, "because they're going to have to stop if they're screwing around."

Brother Chris Englert, principal of Christian Brothers High School in Memphis, said the school gets about 15 to 20 positive results a year and expels three or four.

Bill Fausey, vice president of Psychemedics, said the company tests about 140 schools in the United States. Many are private schools and their numbers are growing, he said. But St. Patrick remains in an exclusive club, considering there are 130,000 private elementary and high schools nationwide.

Laura Shelton, executive director of the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association, said it is believed that only about 5 percent of the nation's schools do testing. Mass testing is even more rare. Still, the numbers are on the rise, she said.