Some Schools Drop Athlete Drug Testing

A handful of public schools in Orange County, once on the vanguard of a national movement to give high school athletes random drug tests, have quietly gotten out of the urinalysis business.

The tests were expensive, inconvenient and ultimately an ineffective deterrent, said Don Martin, principal of Corona del Mar High School, which discontinued its 3-year-old testing program last year. A few other Orange County public schools are continuing the tests.

“I don’t think we were having a great impact on the use and abuse,” Martin said. “The drug of choice on our campus is alcohol. And using other drugs of choice such as Ecstasy, those are not going to show up in a simple urine sample.”

At the same time, even though studies have never proven that testing effectively discourages drug use, private high schools around the county are increasingly embracing random drug testing of all students. They often add the substantial charges--$14 or more per test--for the program to students’ activity fees.

The question of whether such tests are effective or fair emerged as an issue last week after a former nurse at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana sued the school and the Diocese of Orange, alleging she was wrongfully terminated because she complained that a student who tested positive four times was shown preferential treatment and never punished. The principal has denied the charges, and parents and students at Mater Dei have rallied to his and the program’s defense. The diocese did not return telephone calls from The Times.

In a 1995 ruling on an Oregon case, the U.S. Supreme Court authorized random drug tests of high school athletes in public schools. An estimated 1,000 public and private high schools around the country have instituted some form of drug test, said Dr. Linn Goldberg, a professor of Medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University and an expert in drug testing. In other rulings, lesser courts have upheld broader testing of students.

Most programs in public high schools are voluntary, meaning the students and their parents agree to be tested and the tests are paid for through the booster clubs, or doctors and labs volunteer their services. Private high schools often test all students.

At Orange County private schools where students must submit to testing, administrators defend the policy as a sure-fire way to stem drug abuse among teenagers.

Mater Dei Principal Patrick Murphy said last week that no student has tested positive more than twice.

“As most schools will tell you, the increase in drug use across the country is a concern to us,” said Nancy Peterson, assistant principal of Santa Margarita Catholic High School in Rancho Santa Margarita. “We want to give our students every opportunity to say ‘No’ to drug use.”

As at Mater Dei, students who test positive for drugs are referred to counseling services. It is not until the third positive test that a student is asked to withdraw from school, she said.

Peterson, like many principals, students and parents, said the drug-testing program allows students to resist peer pressure and gracefully decline drugs by explaining that they can’t risk failing a drug test.

Experts say there’s just one problem with this logic: It’s never been tested in a scientific study.

“Schools are doing this without evidence that it works,” said Goldberg, who this fall began what he says is the first comprehensive study of whether drug use declines when students are tested. Preliminary results from two Oregon high schools suggest the program may lead to a decline in students’ experimenting, but it’s too soon to say for sure, he added.

Martin, the principal of Corona del Mar High, said his school stopped its 3-year-old testing program after funding dried up and officials began to question whether it was really keeping students from substance abuse.

“It was becoming logistically impossible,” Martin said. Doctors and hospitals that had been volunteering their services began to ask to be paid, and testing students became more difficult because the nurse who performed the tests was only on campus one day a week, he said. What’s more, though very few students tested positive, officials became concerned that students had learned to beat the tests, and that the real problem--alcohol abuse--wasn’t showing up anyway.

“Drug testing can be very expensive,” said Julie Underwood, general counsel for the National School Boards Assn. “If they’re making a decision between a questionably effective program and spending their money on academics, you can understand why they would spend their money on academics.”

Other Orange County public schools that have had drug-testing programs in the past but discontinued them--Brea Olinda High School in Brea, Laguna Hills High School, Mission Viejo High School and Edison High School in Huntington Beach--also cited logistical and funding reasons.

“It’s something we still believe in,” said Ed Adams, assistant principal and athletic administrator at Laguna Hills High. The program was discontinued this year because the doctor who had volunteered to read lab results said he could not offer his time this year.

Laguna Hills is searching for another volunteer doctor, Adams said. In years past, athletes and their parents signed waivers agreeing to participate in the program.

Mission Viejo High School, which stopped its volunteer drug-testing program after the coach who had instituted it passed away, is looking to start it up again, said an administrator there. Many parents of athletes have offered to pay for it, officials said.

Other public Orange County schools, such as El Toro High School and all the schools in the Fullerton Joint Union High School District, continue to offer volunteer drug testing to athletes.

Westlake High School in Westlake has for the last three years offered a volunteer drug-testing program for football players.

Coach Jim Benkert instituted the program, which is paid for by the booster club, after hearing what he calls “horror stories” about weekend parties.

“Kids were doing things that could get them in a lot of trouble, both from an injury standpoint and with the law,” he said. “The purpose is to discourage drug use campuswide.”

Parents and students at Mater Dei, which has given all students random drug tests since 1997, praised the program. “I like it,” said Mater Dei parent John Domenici. “It gives the kids a reason to say no to drugs, and I like the interventions. Wouldn’t you want the chance to get your kid back on the right track?”

Mater Dei senior Katie McDevitt agreed. The program has always seemed fair to her, she said, and drug tests prepare students for “the real world--because jobs do drug tests too.”