After hearing that a majority of students at Homewood-Flossmoor High School support a controversial plan to randomly test student athletes for drugs, the school board gave final approval to the testing policy Tuesday night.
Supt. Edward Rachford said implementation would be delayed until after all administrators in the district had been tested.
Administrators will be tested first both to determine whether testing procedures are adequate and to set an example for the students.
The board president, Karen Hoffschmidt, and board member Robert Butler also volunteered to be tested.
Hoffschmidt also announced that a representative of a family foundation in the community had called her earlier in the day to offer to pay for the testing of the athletes because of the family`s concern about drug use. She did not identify the family or the foundation.
Before the board voted 4-2 to adopt the policy, it heard a report from Amanda Levenberg, the student government president, of a survey of students about the policy. The survey covered 1,587 of the school`s 2,070 students.
Seventy percent of the respondents supported the policy and 74 percent believe drugs are a significant problem at the school.
”About 40 percent feel that (the policy) is a violation of their rights,” Levenberg said. That feeling is strongest among juniors and seniors. ”It`s my very unscientific opinion that as the students get older they tend to be more aware of their rights as they complete the U.S. history course and learn about their rights. Freshmen may believe they do not have any rights at all,” she said.
A seven-page draft of testing operations will be revised and considered at the board`s Oct. 3 meeting.
According to the draft, student athletes would be divided into groups of 20 and each one would be assigned a number. Each week during athletic competition one number would be drawn, and the students with that number would submit a urine test for cocaine, marijuana, opiates, amphetamines and phencyclidine.
A student who tests positive would be put on probation for 30 days and then retested. If still positive, he or she would be excluded from
interscholastic sports for the rest of the school term. A second offense would mean exclusion for a full calendar year.
Before its final approval, the drug policy had gone through two distinct changes.
During the summer, the policy was first proposed by football coach John Wrenn, who asked that athletes be tested based on ”a suspicion” by a coach. But at an August meeting of the school board, Wrenn supported a different version: All athletes would be subject to drug testing, but it would be done randomly. ”I can live with that,” he said.
Yet the school board decided to approve a broader policy, one that called for the random testing of all students engaged in extracurricular activities. That would have included everyone from the football team to the chess club and band.
Two weeks later, in a highly publicized meeting, the board decided to restrict that policy. It voted 5-2 for a policy that applied only to athletes; both a would-be athlete and his or her parents would have to sign a consent form before the athlete could play.
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Parents, teachers and students voiced differing opinions about the policy. Most opponents argued that it would infringe on rights of privacy and that limiting it to athletes was a form of discrimination. Others urged the board to act quickly.