Mater Dei to Randomly Test Students for Drugs

Students at the private Mater Dei High School will find one more test on the curriculum this fall: mandatory drug screening.

The Catholic high school on West Edinger Avenue will begin randomly testing its 2,110 students in grades nine through 12 on the first day of school in a program that school officials say is designed not to catch drug users so much as to give nonusers an incentive to stay clean.

“Research shows that students need a reason to say no without losing face under peer pressure,” Mater Dei Principal Patrick Murphy said. “Random drug testing seems to be one of the strongest reasons a student would say no to drugs.”

Similar programs exist in a few private schools across the nation, including all schools in the San Bernardino Diocese, Murphy said. But he said he thinks Mater Dei is the first large high school in Orange County to adopt mandatory drug testing.

Several Orange County public schools already test their student-athletes for drugs.

The first was Edison High School in Huntington Beach in 1985, which started a voluntary program that was revolutionary at the time. Since then, Edison has eliminated its program, but others have taken it on, including Laguna Hills, Brea Olinda, El Toro and Corona del Mar, which began its program last fall.

Corona del Mar planned to randomly test 10 athletes per week for alcohol, marijuana, amphetamines and cocaine. Positive results would be shared only with parents, so they could determine whether to seek help for their children.

A testing program similar to Mater Dei’s began about five years ago in the small, private Claremont High School in Huntington Beach.

“It works extremely well,” said Phyllis Swank, registrar at Claremont, which has about 130 students in grades seven through 12. “As far as the reception from the parents, it’s been overwhelmingly favorable. My daughter graduated from Claremont last year, and it was always kind of a relief to her. If anybody approached her, she knew that she could be tested at any time. She could make us the heavy.”

Swank, who monitors drug tests for the school’s female students, said such programs help private schools play a role in the students’ developing sense of right and wrong.

“It addresses that drugs have become a major part of our society and an acceptable part in a lot of different portions of society,” she said. “This gives the student the message that it’s not acceptable.”

Under the Mater Dei program, students will be selected by computer to submit to the tests. The frequency will average about four rounds of testing a month, Murphy said, and at irregular intervals to maintain the randomness. In any given round of tests, up to 20% of the student population could be called in.

Mater Dei boys’ athletic director Gary McKnight said the school will either test students’ hair or have them wear sweat patches that would reveal drug use. And he said the use of a computer to pick from among the school’s students will ensure the tests are random.

“You could go two times in one week, or you could not go the whole year,” he said.

The program was announced to students near the end of the last school year. It was developed over four years through meetings with school officials, students and parents, he said.

The impetus came from staff concerns about national studies finding increased drug use by students, Murphy said.

School officials say they believe they are on sound legal footing, arguing that private schools have more leeway in dealing with students than public schools.

“As a private school, we’re under contract with the families,” Murphy said. “Many of the civil rights the public school students would have, they don’t have” in private schools.

In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that an Oregon school district could test its athletes and seemed to confirm that it could test other students as well.

And Ramona Ripston, executive director of ACLU of Southern California, agreed that Mater Dei has even more leeway to test its students because it is a private school.

“You don’t have to go to that private school if you don’t like the rules,” she said.

“The ACLU does believe that drug testing is an invasion of a student’s right to privacy, without some reason to believe that a student is on drugs,” Ripston added. But, “just to implement drug testing without any reason is certainly a violation, we believe.”

She acknowledged that the Supreme Court thinks otherwise.

In the court’s 1995 decision, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “The state’s power over schoolchildren . . . permit[s] a degree of supervision and control that could not be exercised over free adults.”

In dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor faulted the court for clearing the way for millions of innocent students to be subjected “to an intrusive bodily search.”

“Mass, suspicionless searches have been generally considered per se unreasonable within the meaning of the 4th Amendment,” she wrote.

Under Mater Dei’s program, students who fail the drug test will be sent to counseling and face regular testing. A second failed test will result in unspecified disciplinary actions. A third failed test will mean expulsion.

All test results will remain confidential, Murphy said, as will penalties imposed on students.

At Claremont High, students who fail the test undergo counseling and regular testing during the next 90 days. If the tests continue to show a problem, the student is expelled.

Swank would not say how many students have been expelled but said it “very rarely” happens.

Times staff writer Steve Carney contributed to this report.