Paul Blume's Columns - Dealing with the semi-complicated student drug situation (Winter 2006)

Well, as Mary Margaret the Wonder Pooch pointed out the other day, life can be complicated. “Some days you don’t know whether to sleep in the kitchen on the cool floor, sleep in the living room on the soft stuff, or just be anywhere comfortable, working on your chew toy and then go shedding all over the house. Then sleeping wherever you are.”

I don’t know how she keeps up.

Which brings us to some student drug situations. The (relatively) easy ones happen when a student tells the principal that another student has drugs in her purse. The informant is reliable and credible. You check the purse and find a bag of a green vegetable material, which your Student Resource Officer (SRO) field tests, and it turns out to be marijuana. You suspend the offender, notify mom and dad in writing, and set a hearing before the school board. Game. Set. Match.

Not all of them are so simple, however. For example: You have a student who appears to be under the influence of . . . something. No alcohol smell. No marijuana smell. But he’s obviously operating in an alternate universe.

You have a student drug testing policy, but it only permits random drug tests, and then only for the purpose of determining whether a student may participate in extracurricular activities. No provision for suspicion-based testing (that is, you may not do a drug test based on your reasonable suspicion that the student is under the influence of an illicit substance). Do you test, anyway?

No. Pull out your regular student drug policy and see what it provides. Usually, it allows you to make a determination whether the student is under the influence based only on appearance and behavior. Take good notes of his appearance and behavior. Use your SRO for this, also. Many police officers are trained to determine whether a person is under the influence of some substance (and some – a few – can even reliably determine what kind of substance from the person’s appearance).

Mom and dad show up at school, understandably concerned. They don’t want their little dumpling to miss school, so they offer to put him in counseling and have him submit to random drug tests, saying that, if he doesn’t complete the counseling, or if he fails a drug test, you can then expel him.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Don’t do it.

The well-meaning parents are putting you in the position of relying on a drug test or counseling to determine whether the student may stay in school, not for the original offense. We may not drug test for the purpose of determining whether a student may attend school, only for determining whether he may participate in non-credit extracurriculars, and we have no authority to require counseling. Okay, but mom and dad said it was okay. Forget it. When push comes to expulsion, mom and dad will get their nice lawyer (the one with blood dripping from his newly-sharpened fangs), who will tell you that you can’t do that stuff. Oh, and by the way, they agreed to the testing and counseling only because of your insistence and because you said that agreeing to all of that was the only way little dumpling could stay in school. So, you coerced them into that agreement, one which you certainly knew or should have known was improper. You monster.

Even if you don’t think mom and dad will do that, you have no way of knowing what the test results will be, and you have no control over them. How reliable are they? Will you get bad results, or just good ones? If a test shows positive for drugs, will you get that one? If you do, what do you do then?

The simplest and safest way to approach this is to do it according to the book — the student discipline policy book, that is. Deal with the fact that the student is under the influence of drugs (or something) separately from the extracurricular drug-testing policy. If you determine that the student is under the influence based on his appearance and behavior, then deal with that according to your regular drug policy and suspend or expel according to what your drug policy provides. If he’s suspended or expelled from school based on that, his participation in extracurriculars will take care of itself: He won’t be in school to play basketball or to go to the prom.

Basketball, the prom, and other extracurriculars are privileges, not rights. Going to school is a right, but one which may be taken away for a serious violation of the rules. And don’t be seduced by promises from mom and dad. Just deal with it. When they go before the school board in a hearing on expulsion, they can plead their case then. The board has the ability – that is, the discretion – to accept an expulsion recommendation or to shorten the time of expulsion. For that matter, the board can reject the expulsion recommendation altogether. The board hearing is where that decision should be made. On the other hand, an administrator has the obligation to make a recommendation consistent with the policy the board already has enacted. If the punishment is to be less than that in the policy, the board should make that decision. Only the board.

Mary Margaret (who pays attention when I’m dictating this stuff) says that withholding Milk Bones for a week should be punishment enough for anyone, but it would constitute cruel and unusual punishment for a pooch. At least for her. I doubt that there’s anything in your policies about Milk Bones. She says that you might want to look it up, though. Just in case.

Return to list of Paul Blume's columns