Random teacher drug tests in North Carolina

ROBBINSVILLE, N.C. — Teachers in this small rural town’s school district are awaiting a state appeals court ruling to see whether they’ll be required to submit to random tests for drugs and alcohol.

Graham County, N.C., which has fewer than 1,200 students, is one of a small group of school districts in the nation attempting to establish random drug tests of teachers and other employees.

The district would be among the “very, very few” to randomly test teachers, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Adam Wolf says.

School districts in at least four Kentucky counties — Knott, Montgomery, Letcher and Floyd — do random testing, the Kentucky Education Association’s Tim Southern said.

Teachers in Kanawha County, W.Va., came close to being subjected to such testing, but three days before its Jan. 1 start, a federal district court stopped it. The idea is also on hold in Hawaii, awaiting a state board’s ruling.

“It would be in our view a waste of money, because there is no problem that a drug-testing program can address,” said Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel with the National Education Association.

In North Carolina, a lawsuit by the state teachers’ association prevented a 2007 start for random drug testing in Graham County schools.

Former county school board chairman Mitch Colvard says he saw a worsening local drug problem in his job as a paramedic. He pushed for the policy in 2006.

“I think when I put my kids in their hands, they lose their rights,” Colvard says. “My rights are more important.”

via USATODAY.com.

Mr. Colvard, what right of yours is it that we’re protecting with random teacher drug testing?  Your right to invade the bodily integrity of your children’s instructor?

First of all, you must acknowledge that random urine screening is not an exact science.  There are medications and conditions that can create a false positive test.  There are adulterants and supplements that can create a false negative test.  Most drug screening doesn’t bother to detect those who abuse alcohol.  Most of all, urine screening disproportionately detects those who use cannabis over those who use meth, cocaine, heroin, and hallucinogens, as those substances flush out of the system within a couple of days.  

So if your goal is to insure your children are never in a classroom with a drug-addled teacher, then random drug testing is not a good method to achieve that goal.  The tests wouldn’t catch a drunk teacher or a teacher stoned on Vicodin, and those teachers who would fail for meth, cocaine, heroin, or hallucinogens should be so easily detected by observation that a test is unnecessary.  Truly the random drug test exists solely to catch marijuana smokers because without it, there is no obvious signs of marijuana use to detect.

So if the problem then is teachers who use marijuana teaching your children, but in practice you can’t determine their past marijuana use by simple observation, what exactly is it that you’re intending to protect your children from?  What harm from marijuana is going to befall your children when the harm from marijuana to the instructor is so slight you have to confiscate his urine to even determine if he uses marijuana?

Here’s an idea: why don’t you take the money you were going to spend on getting hard-working underpaid teachers to pee in a cup and spend it instead on, oh I don’t know, up-to-date history books, pencils, globes, microscopes, paper, and some teaching assistants?  Unless you think your kids are more interested in the metabolites in the teacher’s pee than the lessons in the teacher’s head.