Excuse for Teens to Forgo Drugs

As a golf cart ferried him from physics class to the office, Matt Nejad thought his frequent tardies finally had caught up with him. Instead, the lanky San Clemente High School senior found himself urinating into a plastic cup.

Five minutes later, he was back in class, having snagged a fleeting reprieve from his studies and confirmation for his parents that he’s drug-free.

San Clemente High’s unusual voluntary random-testing program is part of a new -- and much-debated -- approach to fighting teen drug use.

Most schools conduct drug tests as a condition of participating in extracurricular activities or in exchange for rewards. Testing at San Clemente -- where about 1,000 students participate -- and at two other southern Orange County high schools is different.

Results are known only to the student and parents; neither school officials nor police are notified if a test result is positive for drugs.

Principal Charles Hinman and his counterparts at Laguna Beach and Trabuco Hills high schools say the program protects teenagers from peer pressure, empowering students to just say no and still be cool.

Students enrolled in such programs -- and those who want to pretend they are -- have an excuse at parties to pass on smoking a joint or snorting a line of cocaine, saying they would but their parents have signed them up for drug testing.

“Most of the middle-of-the-road kids are looking for a reason to say no and still maintain their coolness,” said Robert DuPont, president of the Institute for Behavior and Health and the first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“Drug testing gives them an out.”

Administrators believe the program’s voluntary nature -- parents enroll their children for testing at the beginning of the school year -- allows them to skirt sensitive privacy concerns. Although some students and parents have questioned the efficacy and logic of a program that has no school- or law enforcement-related consequences, Hinman said testing tries to address drug use in a deeper way.

“It’s the purest moral effort to help kids say no,” he said. “When there is no punishment, there can be no confusion. All we’re trying to get out of this program is a tool against peer pressure if kids want it, and treatment if kids need it.”

A study by the University of Michigan found that 54% of U.S. teens surveyed said they had tried an illicit drug by the time they finished high school, with 6% of seniors reporting daily marijuana use. The same study showed that those students who had used drugs were less likely to go to college and more likely to drop out.

For that reason, schools have a responsibility to help parents intervene before the problem escalates, many education and law enforcement officials say.

“Oftentimes, parents only find out their kids use drugs when we’ve arrested them for stealing or prostitution or they’re in the hospital with an overdose,” said Sgt. Roger Neumeister, who heads the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s Juvenile Services Bureau.

The Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Assn. estimates about 500 public school districts nationwide have some sort of drug-testing program at one or more of their schools. The vast majority require testing for students involved in athletics or certain other extracurricular activities.

Only about 15 districts nationally offer voluntary programs open to all students. Some of those, however, offer tangible incentives to boost participation -- such as discounts for school dances or backpack patches.

The school board of the Dublin Unified district in Northern California, for example, is considering a voluntary program that would give gold stars and discounts at local businesses to those who enroll.

Principals of the three Orange County schools, which are among a handful that have voluntary programs without incentives, say such visible markers of participation make it impossible for students not enrolled in the program to use it as an excuse to refuse drugs.

Some educators, however, argue that a testing program available to all students is perilously close to requiring every child to be tested -- a step that inevitably would bring invasion-of-privacy lawsuits.

Those lawsuits are less likely if parental consent is required, “but it’s better to have it as a formal program tied to something concrete like extracurricular activities so that no student can quibble with their right to refuse to take the test,” said Edwin Darden, senior staff attorney for the National School Boards Assn.

Other critics say the voluntary testing program neglects the rights of students. Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, praised the programs for the punishment-free approach to dealing with teen drug use. But he cautioned that parental consent should be irrelevant if the students themselves do not want to be tested.

“If they said free speech at school is banned if parents consent, there would be an uproar,” he said. “That consent doesn’t get around student rights.”

The largest trial of a program similar to those in Orange County was in Miami, where high schools offered off-campus testing for randomly selected students. It ended in 1999 after six months because only a few dozen enrolled.

For some schools, paying for a drug-testing program -- which will cost San Clemente High an estimated $10,000 a year -- is an issue. Los Angeles Unified spokeswoman Cricket Bauer said it would be difficult for strapped urban districts such as hers to consider launching programs not directly related to academic improvement.

Schools in affluent suburban regions such as Orange County have an advantage over urban districts in that community support is easier to mobilize, Darden said. Across the country in suburban Long Island, the Glen Cove School District is considering a voluntary testing program that already has strong backing among parents.

“Some districts are so sprawling it would be impossible to ever arrive at a consensus about something as divisive as drug testing,” he said. “Parents in suburban schools have a tendency to trust whatever the district recommends and the time to back it actively and make sure it succeeds.”

Participation at San Clemente ranges from 55% of freshmen to 20% of seniors. Of the 70 tests completed there this year, one student has refused to take the test and four have tested positive for marijuana use.

At Trabuco Hills and Laguna Beach high schools, where school officials do not even see summaries of test results, principals said they do not know how many students have enrolled.

San Clemente senior Lesley Navarro doubts the program reaches the students who need it most, saying that kids she knows with serious drug problems often lack parents who are interested in their welfare.

“Most of the kids that are signed up for it aren’t the ones doing [drugs],” said Navarro, who is enrolled in the testing program. “My friends who do drugs said they never turned it in, or put ‘No’ and forged their parents’ signature.”

Others, such as senior Andrew Kartunen, say tests will provide a wake-up call to those parents who mistakenly assume their children don’t use drugs.

“A lot of parents think their kids are perfect,” he said. “If I were a parent, this would be a service the school provides that would let me know for sure if they used drugs or not.”

For each test at San Clemente, the testing company’s computer randomly selects students, who are called out of class and brought to the health office by golf cart, both to expedite transportation at the sprawling campus and ensure they don’t stop anywhere first to snag a clean sample.

Tests are given nearly every four weeks, and the 30 or so students chosen must use the office bathrooms, where sinks are plastic-wrapped and with trash cans removed so kids can’t water down their samples or leave clean ones for fellow test-takers.

The testing company tells parents of negative results by phone the same day. If the results are positive, parents are notified by mail and given counseling referrals and paperwork for the child to take a suggested follow-up test at company headquarters to determine frequency of use. A school psychologist also is available if parents want free counseling for the student.

San Clemente pays for the program with funds from school support groups and a state safety grant. At Trabuco Hills and at Laguna Beach High, parents return permission slips with $30 checks for the testing fee.

Many San Clemente parents have embraced the voluntary approach, saying it has sparked greater communication.

“We have talked about drugs several times because of this program,” said Peggy Griffin, whose son Stephen, a senior, is signed up. “I credit this program for that because we had never talked about drugs before.”

Back on campus, as Matt Nejad washed his hands after being tested, he said he hadn’t even thought about the program since turning in his permission slip in September.

“It only affects me in a positive way,” he said. “I get out of class, and my parents know for sure that I’m drug-free.”