Urineschool: A study of the impact of the Earls decision on high school random drug testing policies

Journal of Law and Education, Jul 2003 by Conlon, Cynthia Kelly

The two principals identified a number of barriers to adoption. One explained that parents were very protective of their children and worried about invasion of their privacy rights. He stated that he is spending a great deal of time trying to develop a "ground swell" of support among parents for the idea of random drug testing. He is also educating students about the school's right to implement such a policy. "They [the students] think they have the same rights in school that they do in general. I tell them, you lose a lot of rights when you come to school." The second principal pointed to resistance on the part of the school board as well as the inability of the superintendent to take a strong position in favor of random drug testing. He also noted that many parents do not really want to know if their children are using: "denial is the first line of defense."

The other four principals of schools without random drug testing were also asked to identify barriers to implementation at their schools. They mentioned each of the following: the difficulty of getting support from all members of the community (especially student support), cost, and the problems with preserving confidentiality and maintaining student trust.

All seven of the principals of the schools without random drug testing were then asked to predict the likelihood that random drug testing would be adopted in their districts. Using a five-point scale, with "1" indicating "remote" and "5" indicating "very likely," the average of their responses was 2.0 (unlikely). The principal who was working hard to gain support, however, optimistically predicted that it is "likely" that random drug testing would be adopted at his school.

All ten principals were also asked to use a five-point scale to rank a number of factors in terms of their significance in adopting random drug testing in their schools (with "1" indicating "not important" and "5" indicating "extremely important"). A comparison of the rankings of principals of schools with random drug testing and principals of schools without random drug testing appears in Chart B:

The rankings vary dramatically depending upon whether the school has or has not instituted random drug testing. Schools with random drug testing indicate that it is vital to secure parental support, ensure test validity, and protect students' rights before adopting this policy. Schools without random drug testing, however, emphasize the importance of securing legal authority to test. Securing student support is very important to schools with random drug testing but much less important to those schools without it. Securing police support, on the other hand, is less important to schools with random drug testing than to schools without it. In general, the rankings of schools with random drug testing are higher. This perhaps reflects the fact that these schools have had to actually weigh these factors in the process of instituting a testing program while the schools without random drug testing are engaged in a hypothetical ranking exercise. These data could also reflect the fact that once schools decide to adopt a random drug testing policy, priorities change, making securing student support and ensuring test validity more critical.