Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
As testing has grown in popularity, opposition to it has been expanding to include conservative parents, as well as angry students and civil libertarians. The testing doesn't just invade privacy and curtail civil rights, say critics, it encourages student alcohol use, encourages rebellion in adolescents ripe for battle and discourages extracurricular participation among the kids who need it most, while targeting the most active students for scrutiny.
Legal challenges to the policy at the state and federal level have multiplied along with the arguments against it. The Tecumseh case is the first case to make it to the Supreme Court since Vernonia, but the state of Indiana has been debating the topic nonstop since the mid-1990s.
Indiana is where the Bible Belt meets the fan belt: a conservative and religious state with an economy dominated by the automotive industry. Statistically speaking, Indiana does not have rampant teen drug problems: For example, nationally, 37 percent of all high school seniors smoked marijuana in the year 2000, according to the Monitoring the Future survey, yet only 35.4 percent of all Indiana seniors did. The state has had a small epidemic of methamphetamine use, and Ecstasy use is climbing -- as it is almost everywhere in the nation -- but it's hardly off the charts.
For locals, however, any drug use is too much drug use. Accordingly, local authorities have imposed a series of heavy-handed laws designed to keep kids (and adults) out of trouble, from drug roadblocks to mandatory curfews to the controversial drug testing programs.
Lawyer Ken Falk of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union (ICLU) has been battling these laws all the way, with a few successes and a few failures. On March 18, he lost his most recent crusade, a four-year-long lawsuit against the Northwestern School Corporation on behalf of the Linke family of Kokomo. In deciding for the school corporation, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that drug testing of students involved in extracurricular activities was legal under Indiana state law.
The Linke family lives in a charming, century-old farmhouse with a picturesque view of the pancake-flat fields outside the town of Kokomo, Ind. Like most locals, the Linkes work for the automotive industry, describe themselves as politically "conservative" and spend their weekends attending various Lutheran churches. Their three daughters are top students and good athletes: Rosa, now in college, was on the track team and yearbook, and was in the National Honor Society; Reena, a cheerful blond senior, is also on yearbook and track, sings in the choir and is a member of Students Against Drunk Driving and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes; dimpled Lydia, a home-schooled eighth grader, will be a cheerleader when she returns to public school in the fall.
The Linkes joke that they have always viewed the Indiana Civil Liberties Union as "the devil," although, as mother Noreen Linke puts it now, "When the devil is on the right side, where are you supposed to be?"
The Linkes contacted the devil (in the form of the ICLU) in 1999, when Reena and Rosa were told by Northwestern High School that they would have to submit to random drug testing if they wanted to continue to participate in their extracurricular activities. Although neither girl drank or did drugs, they felt strongly that their privacy was being invaded, and the family decided to file suit against the school district. They lost in the local courts but won in the appellate court in 2000 -- a victory that briefly put a halt to high school drug testing across the state -- before finally losing again in the state Supreme Court in March.
The Linkes' lawsuit sent a tremor of scandal through their small community. The parents were snubbed by conservative friends, and the family's mailbox filled with anonymous letters in strange handwriting, most of which accused them of thinking they were better than everyone else. At the same time, the girls discovered that many students and even some teachers were thrilled about the case; as a bonus, Rosa even had some new admirers. "I was very popular among the druggie crowd," she says wryly.
According to Northwestern School Corporation superintendent Ryan Snoddy, the high school implemented the drug tests after an anonymous student survey indicated that there was a "higher than average" number of drug users among the 580 students at the school; additionally, he says, there had been three student deaths attributed to illegal substances in the previous decade.
"This was something that needed to be addressed, and our reactive measures -- suspension, expulsion, parent notification -- weren't as effective as they could be," he says. "They occur after the fact, and after a death is too late." Northwestern was hardly a lax school -- students had already experienced drug-sniffing dogs and locker searches, abstinence-only and anti-drug education programs, a closed campus with video surveillance in the parking lots, and a zero-tolerance policy for suspicious or violent behavior. But drug tests were deemed a necessary addition to the list in January of 1999.
About 75 percent of Northwestern's middle school and high school students are now in the "pool" for drug testing (which halted temporarily during the lawsuit, but was reinstated in January) -- basically, anyone who plays sports, does extracurricular activities or drives to school. On a semiregular basis (Snoddy won't say how often), a drug testing trailer pulls up to the school; two dozen students are randomly selected from the pool, brought to the trailer and asked to produce a sample (if it takes them three hours to urinate, so be it).
The student urine is then examined for drugs, alcohol or tobacco, and those who test positive undergo a series of punishments, including counseling, a parent-teacher meeting and suspension from all sports and extracurricular activities until another test comes out negative.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
