Schools’ New Drug Policy Satisfies Few

A new drug-abuse policy covering teachers and other school employees who work with children was adopted Tuesday by San Diego city schools’ trustees, but it satisfied neither the school board nor the district’s two major labor unions.

The policy would offer employees suspected of substance abuse the chance to take a voluntary drug test and enter a rehabilitation program. If the employee refuses, the district asserts the right to require a health and/or psychological examination and to use the results to determine whether the employee can continue to work.

The board already has a policy requiring pre-employment testing for workers in sensitive positions, such as bus drivers and security officers.

The San Diego Teachers Assn., which represents the district’s 6,000 teachers, gave official notice to the board that it will file an “unfair labor practice” with the state Public Employment Relations Board over the policy, which will delay implementation until the panel makes a decision.

The SDTA says the district does not have the right to require such an examination without reaching agreement first with the union during negotiations. The union and the district have been talking for more than five months without reaching a compromise.

“Now, the district has become impatient and decided to act unilaterally,” SDTA President Hugh Boyle told the board Tuesday. “So we deliver to you a demand to bargain over the drug policy . . . once again placing us into the adversarial positions which we have been trying so hard to avoid.” Boyle said the policy smacks of violations of personal rights and will fail, if implemented, to stem drug problems because it is too broad-brushed.

Trustees, however, said they would have preferred to bring in mandatory testing of any employee suspected of substance abuse as their effort to comply with the federal government’s policy for a drug-free workplace.

“This policy is way smaller in scope than the board (originally) intended,” board president Kay Davis said. She said the board was willing to go along with a more limited policy, conceding that the unions still “have a different perspective on how to set an example.”

Davis said “the drug problem is so immense that we need to be impeccable . . . to set standards so high and so pure to set an example for students.”

Trustee Jim Roache, a deputy sheriff, said the policy is so weak that he was tempted to vote against it. But he went along with the rest of the board because it can serve as a first step, he said.