Greenwood School Board considers drug testing policy for student-athletes

As the Greenwood School District continues to pursue its goal of excellence across all of the programs and activities it offers, the school board is now considering a drug testing policy that would hold its student-athletes and club members to a higher standard. The board was presented with a first draft of the policy during its March 22 meeting, and will be going over the details about the policy in the next few months to decide if it is feasible and practical to apply to the school’s students. No action was taken on the drug testing policy at the meeting, but District Administrator Joe Green informed the board about what the general idea of the policy. The details of how it will be implemented – if at all – will be discussed at the board’s next regular meeting in April.

“This is just an idea of what a policy on random testing of our co-curricular participants would look like,” he said. “But we don’t know everything yet; we don’t know what resources we would have at our disposal to carry this out.”

According to Green, the policy will only affect those students participating in athletic or co-curricular events at the middle and high school level. This is due to search and seizure laws that ban randomized searches and tests on the regular student body. Because students voluntarily participate in extra-curricular events, he said, they could be subjected to randomized tests for drugs and alcohol.

“Because students are required to be at school, they fall under the search and seizure law, which means that a test can’t be random,” he said. “But co-curricular participants and athletes are voluntarily participating. If someone doesn’t want to participate, that is a choice they make. So the rules are different between school and co-curriculars.”

As the policy is a rough draft, Green said there will have to be a lot of discussion on whether or not a drug testing policy could work in Greenwood and what that would look like. Currently, there are not many other school districts in the state that have a policy like this on the books, and the policy itself can be limited by what resources are available in the county.

“This is not widespread; a lot of districts don’t have this,” he said. “But that shouldn’t stop us from doing something that is right for our students, school and community. We need to look at how we could implement this with the resources in the county and district that we have.”

Following the meeting, Green clarified why there was an interest in looking into a drug testing policy. Despite it being a policy to randomly test student-athletes and co-curricular activity participants for alcohol and drug usage, he said there isn’t a major concern about students using illegal substances at the Greenwood School District. Rather, he said the policy is just another way the school is looking to hold its student body to a higher standard. “I don’t think there’s any different concern with drug usage than there has been here for the past 15-20 years,” he said. “Greenwood is not doing any worse or better than its neighbors in that regard. But we are trying to hold our student-athletes to a higher level of excellence. They are representing our school here and in the community and in other communities.”

Other business In other action taken by the board at its meeting, the board received cost estimates of putting up permanent drywall walls in its elementary school building. The estimates put the project from anywhere between $1.8 million to $3 million. Because the cost came in much higher than expected, the board decided to abandon the idea of putting up those type of walls in the building but continue to look for other options that would achieve the same effect. The board also approved a plan to pay off the remainder of a pair of loans using the last of the district’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) III funds. The district will pay the remaining $239,040.53 in its unfunded liability loan in the next month and plans to pay off the remaining $186,513.64 of the loan on its elementary school entrance project in June.