A local school corporation can now drug test students if they have reasonable suspicion to believe they are at school under the influence. The Eastern Pulaski School Board approved a corporation-wide reasonable suspicion policy Monday evening. Superintendent Dan Foster says they sought input from other schools and the Indiana School Board Association as to how to handle such matters.
“It’s like insurance. We sure wish we would never have to use that, but I would be perhaps naïve to sit here and say that it’s not going to happen here, so we just have it just in case. That’s a little naïve, and I guess if I truly felt that way we probably wouldn’t have taken the time to try to create this policy.”
Foster adds the bottom line is the safety of students, faculty and staff.”
“If a student is indeed on something, they can pose a threat to themselves and/or others, and that’s not a good situation. If you have a 15 or 16-year-old that’s on some illegal narcotic or something, then if we can’t step in and try to do something about that then that student possibly not going down the right road in their adult life, it would be partially punitive, but hopefully it would be partially helpful to wake the student up and get them on the right course, so to speak.”
Foster admits the policy creates a “darned if you do, darned if you don’t” conundrum for the school corporation.”
“If you truly feel this way, do you just send a kid back to class because, well, they don’t have anything on them, so you can’t prove it? Well, that may not be the case. We did some homework and, like I said, we drafted some policy based on some other schools and school board association advice. I’d like to say we’d never have to use it, but we’ve got something in place that gives some more support to our administration.”
The Eastern Pulaski School Corporation Reasonable Suspicion Policy too effect upon its passage.
