School Drug Testing
In Bush's Saturday, July 17,2004 radio address, he suggested that schools should be allowed to drug test and proposed funding for this program.
"We know that random drug testing in schools is effective, and it allows us to identify kids who need help. In my most recent budget, I proposed spending an additional $23 million for school drug testing." George W. Bush, WASHINGTON, July 17 /PRNewswire. http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/07-17-2004/0002212115&EDATE=
Are we not more protective of our children’s privacy than this? To allow the very schools that we rant and rave are failing our children, keep tabs on which ones of our children have used drugs or alcohol? And where is this big database of our children’s "youthful indiscretions", going to be kept, and who will have access to this information?
This is the real problem with our children, this is really the reason that our schools are failing. It's not because of what the schools are not doing, it is because of what ALL we are expecting, allowing them to do.
There was a time when certain matters were family matters. When certain things were none of the school's damn business. When we had a since of protecting our fort. Our parents would NEVER have considered allowing the schools, a public bureaucracy, to test us for STD's let along drugs. But, then there was a time, they wouldn't have went for drug screening on their jobs either.
This seems to me that it could lead to future invasions of privacy. We don't know if we will be able to protect these test results from public disclosure. I can see some media organization taking this issue to court and winning. We see what is happening with professional athlete's, how their use of performance enhancers are being publicly disclosed.
I feel we owe it to our kids to talk to them about sex. To talk to them about drugs. To talk to them about their dreams, their goals. And I feel we have even more of a responsibility to protect them from bad public school policies. I do not believe we should entrust to the schools a medical analysis that should be made in the privacy of families along with the counsel of the child’s physician.
