Shasta County, California Superior Court Judge Monica Marlow decided to temporarily suspend mandatory drug testing for all extracurricular activities in Shasta County high schools. Students in that district were subject to random drug testing if they wanted to join any extracurricular activity and after school activities including band, choir, Future Farmers of America (FFA), chess club, debate team or anything else. Besides being blatantly unconstitutional, this policy has a serious policy flaw; it alienates the students these activities were created to help.
After school activities were created to help disadvantaged students or students at high risk of drug use to have an option to stay out of trouble after school. By offering activities like band, drama, and sports, students who have a bad home life, are exposed to illicit drugs or gangs have a place to go. In addition, those children who might not get great grades for whatever reason can earn scholarships by participating in extracurricular activities.
High school extracurricular programs in California already had serious problems, Shasta County was no exception. Proposition 13 in California had made it hard on poorer communities to even offer after school activities do to a weighted tax structure that left less fortunate districts with even less money.
More recently, voters in California voted to make after school programs mandatory in elementary through junior high school, in an attempt to curb after school crime. (The voters and the Governor, who sponsored the bill, did not bother to research after school crime. After bringing it up with a representative of the bill, he confessed that two thirds of juvenile after school crimes are committed by children of high school age.) When the voters mandated the pre-high school after school programs, money had to be diverted from high schools to fund the new mandate, shrinking already stretched high school programs.
Disadvantaged students all over California have had the opportunities offered by extracurricular activities disintegrate, just like the budget. Now many school districts, like Santa Cruz, are closing their athletics programs all together. Over the last few years, many schools have removed music, art, PE, vocational training, and other “nonessential” subjects.
In the face of these limited opportunities for at-risk or academically poorly performing students, Shasta County Union High School District has the gall of contracting the potential experiences offered at their school, even though they have the funding.
Shasta County has been testing their high school athletes for ten years but only recently expanded to all extracurricular activities sponsored by the school. The superintendent of Shasta Union High School District, Jim Cloney, defended the policy by saying, “We still feel our policy is preventive and provides reasons for kids not to use drugs.”
As with so many school administrators, Jim Cloney does not understand the effects of his policy on his school or the surrounding community. It will not prevent any student from using drugs. It will discourage those students who need after school programs and extracurricular activities, the children who after school activities were supposed to serve, from participating. It closes doors for kids who otherwise might not be able to get scholarships, takes away opportunities and limits the pool of children who will participate to those who already have concerned parents. Those children do not need school sponsored activities.
Cloney is not drug testing straight A students as a requirement to earn their GPA. He would never assert that these children are at high risk for using performance enhancing drugs to keep their grades up or that participating in classes makes them eligible for drug testing. In fact, the idea is so asinine, it is dizzying but this is exactly the logic Cloney is applying to after school, extracurricular and cocurricular activities.
Shasta County's omni-directional drug testing policy reveals one of two things. 1. Cloney is intentionally targeting of disadvantaged students for whom these programs were created or 2. Cloney is wrecklessly incompetent, has little consideration for his role as an agent of the government and completely disregards his task of improving the community through the equitable education of children.
It is not a schools responsibility to prevent the use of drugs amongst its students. It is a schools job to prevent drug use in school and to educate about the effects of drug use. A school has no right to regulate the lives of its students once they are no longer in their care, unless the schools want to be responsible for the home lives of these children.
Schools should be targeting children at high risk of drug use or those they know use drugs for after school programs. High school extracurricular programs were designed to excite these children away from drugs, to a supervised location, for non conventional learning. I guess Cloney thinks only “good” children deserve opportunities. Intentional exclusion or not, Cloney's policy will certainly fail to achieve its stated goal, keeping kids off drugs.
Want to do something about it?
Jim Cloney
Superintendent
jcloney@suhsd.net
Phone: (530) 241.3261
Fax: (530) 245.2777
http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2009/may/06/judge-halts-drug-testing-at-2-calif-high-schools/
http://www.redding.com/news/2009/may/04/judge-to-rule-on-shasta-drug-testing-policy/
http://www.pillsburylaw.com/student_privacy_drugs
http://www.times-standard.com/statenews/ci_12308342
http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Cloney_Jim_97675902.aspx
http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/1839103.html?mi_rss=Latest%20News
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