The Williamsburg Board of Education approved a resolution on April 18, 2016 to begin randomly drug testing high school students next year.

The Williamsburg Board of Education approved a resolution on April 18, 2016 to begin randomly drug testing high school students next year.
By Kelly Cantwell
Editor

Beginning this fall, certain Williamsburg High School students may be randomly drug tested, as part of a new policy the Board of Education approved on April 18.

The board and Superintendent Matt Earley have been discussing the possibility for the last couple months. They held a parent information session on April 12 to discuss it further with the community, Earley said.

About 25 parents attended and as a result, the board modified the policy to reflect some of the points that parents brought up. There has not been much opposition to the proposal, Earley said.

“We have a great community that, for the most part, understands this policy and what we’re doing for prevention for our students,” Earley said.

He feels that the students at Williamsburg are excellent, but they are teenagers and sometimes do not make the best choices, especially when there is peer pressure involved, Earley said.

“I think any opportunity we as a school have to prevent drug use, we have to take advantage of it,” Earley said.

The policy is not an attempt to punish students, but rather to prevent students from starting to use substances.

“We don’t want to see kids use any banned substance that then turns into a lifelong problem,” Earley said.

The drugs that high school students typically experiment with can be gateway drugs. In addition, high school years are formative years and habits formed can have a long term effect, said board president Greg Wells.

“We really thought that the cost reward component in this thing was well worth it,” Wells said.

Earley researched schools that are drug testing students and he researched testing companies so that he could write the best policy and use the right company. He chose Great Lakes Biomedical because he found it was the most prevalent in the state.

In his research, he found that schools with drug testing policies reduce drug use by providing students with education about how harmful the substances are.

When Great Lakes staff come to the district, they will do a test on site to see if there are any positive results for substances. If there are, the staff will send the test to a lab to confirm if it is positive.

If a student tests positive for drugs, there will be some consequences, such as sitting out a percentage of the extracurricular activity they are involved in or not being allowed to drive to school. Only students in an extracurricular activity, on a sports team, going to homecoming or prom or driving to school can be tested.

The tests will cost $15-20 per student, depending on what the Great Lakes staff is testing for. On any given test day, the district can ask Great Lakes to test for up to 10 substances, Earley said.

The district allocated up to $10,000 to implement the program. They are looking into grants, Earley said.

“We’re excited to get it implemented,” Wells said.

He heard from other districts that once it was put in place, it became routine.

The staff will implement the policy for a year and then evaluate it. Earley hopes that after the first year they will look back and wonder why they didn’t begin a drug testing program sooner.

Earley has been to more than one funeral of a Williamsburg High School alumnus who died from drug use, and he hopes never to again.

“If we can prevent even one kid from getting addicted to a harmful substance it’s worth our while,” Earley said.

New Richmond Exempted Village School District implemented the policy this year. While the staff will not study the first year until June, superintendent Adam Bird believes it will be back in place next year. It went smoothly, considering it was the first year.

“We believe that it’s had a positive impact on the culture and climate of our high school,” Bird said.