School Board President Responds

Barry Schwab is president of the school board and is running for re-election this year. Obviously, since I cast my vote to rescind Policy 5013, I think the Board of Education’s decision was the right one. I had become increasingly averse to the policy over the last two and more years for a number of mostly-related reasons. What ultimately put me in the “nix the policy” camp was all of the nibbling around the edges of the policy we were doing to try (in my view) to downplay the fact of the school’s exercising an authority it really had no business exercising in the first place. Using random drug testing in order to know what kids are up to 24/7, nine months out of the year, is such an obscene overreach on the school’s part. Set aside the argument of whether or not the policy constitutes an infringement of students’ personal freedom. It’s the parents’ right to keep tabs on their kids—indeed, it’s the parents’ responsibility foremost, above any institution’s.I’ve heard the claims on the other side of this issue. As I understand it, by voting to rescind Policy 5013, I’ve proven myself to be variously either: (a) oblivious to the drug problem in our schools, (b) indifferent to the drug problem in our schools, or (c) encouraging the drug problem in our schools. I suppose some might even believe I’m such a bad dude that I can manage all of those at the same time. (No mean feat!) In any event, by voting as I did, I clearly deprived our district of the only tool that possibly exists to fight the problem. It’s self-evident, right?Except that it isn’t. These are unserious claims made by unserious people. They are straw man arguments fraught with either/or fallacies. Furthermore, the case for keeping Policy 5013 relies on unfalsifiable feelings about what it actually accomplished. When the policy was first implemented in 2017, its express purpose was to help demonstrate (to whom remains a little unclear to me) that Fairbury Public Schools didn’t have any more of a drug problem than other school districts. [Scratching my head.] Its passage also sought, as administration has stated often by rote during Board of Education meetings over the past several years, to “give students an opportunity to say ‘no’.” However, no data have been presented to me to indicate that these objectives have been or are even in the process of being met by the policy. I question what data could possibly prove such nebulous goals. Policy 5013 ordered a random selection each month of roughly 10% of junior and senior high students who participated in one or more extracurricular activities as detailed in the policy. Those students provided urine samples on demand (or as quickly as their bladders would allow), and the samples were sent to a contracted testing company to be analyzed for the presence of a number of illicit substances. Now quite a few students participate in activities, but not all of them, not by a long shot. And legally, we can’t do random drug testing among the general student population because the courts have found that is an infringement of students’ civil rights—students are compulsorily attending school, after all, and to further compel them to submit to drug testing is considered a bridge too far. We can only get away with doing it to those who have volunteered as a consequence of their being participants in extracurricular (i.e., noncompulsory) activities. Quite the clever loophole, huh?Anyway, when the data are made available indicating how many students were tested and how many positives we had each month and each year, what do they show us? Well, as is so often the case with data, they can show us whatever we want to believe. Do I want to believe that drug use isn’t that bad in Fairbury Public Schools? I can find that belief in the total positives over the years. In 2017-18, we had 3 students test positive throughout the entire school year. In 2018-19, we had 3. In 2019-20 (the first year we included nicotine in the array), we had 6. In 2020-21, we had 13. In 2021-22, we had 9. All in all, pretty modest numbers—only one year in the double digits. Of course, I have to dismiss the fact of the extraordinarily small sample sizes (each month, remember, we tested just a fraction of a fraction of the total student body), the fact of varying sample sizes from year to year, the fact that some months of some years saw no testing conducted at all (remember the COVID Spring of 2020?), and—oh, yeah—the fact that we don’t have any numbers from other schools to compare to. Random drug testing in schools doesn’t seem to be prevalent, at least not in these parts. (For your consideration, we believe that no other schools in the Southern Nebraska Conference have a drug testing policy.)So is Fairbury Public Schools’ drug problem the same as everywhere else? I dunno. Maybe, maybe not. That’s my point. There’s no confirmation one way or the other in the scanty data that the drug testing policy has provided us, with no comparables. How, then, would we rationalize maintaining a policy premised on meeting an objective that we can’t even measure?As for giving kids a chance to say “no,” we once again run into an evidentiary conundrum. How do you quantify how many kids have availed themselves of the opportunity to say “no” because of Policy 5013? Certainly, anecdotes have been provided during discussion and debate that seem to support qualitatively the case that the policy had some positive impact. Anecdotes are notoriously unreliable, however. You have to take on faith that the story you’re being told is the God’s-honest truth, and not just something that artfully advances a narrative and tells you what somebody wants you to hear. Proving that a drug testing policy was the one thing missing from a student’s life, however—that one thing he needed to be able to lay off the vaping because he didn’t want to jeopardize his basketball season—is impossible. Now such a policy may indeed be among the things that gives a student the willpower to pass on passing that bong around the party room. I’ll concede the point. But at what cost? Giving over to a school—a school!—the power to employ broad-based law enforcement-style tactics?By the way, as my colleague Jody Starr noted during discussion of Policy 5013 at Monday’s Board meeting, we’ve been giving students the opportunity to say “no” for years before there was ever a drug testing policy. It’s called the Student Handbook, and it contains a good many rules for conduct for students, activity participants and nonparticipants alike. How many people realize that apart from the drug testing bit, Policy 5013 closely mirrored content that was already in the Student Handbook?…Don’t misunderstand me. Schools do have a role in meeting the mandate of a civil society—to encourage our children to become the best adults they can be so that the very society itself can continue and thrive through the next generations. As much as anyone, I want our kids to be successful, to be kind and respectful of others, to have happy lives free of dependence on mind-numbing and health-harming drugs, and to just generally make many more good choices than bad ones during the 90 or 100 or so years they can anticipate having on this earth. As much as anyone, I believe that schools are an incredibly important part of people’s formative years, and schools shouldn’t take lightly the solemn responsibility that’s placed on them while they have those impressionable young lives in their care. As much as anyone, I want our coaches and sponsors and everyone else who earns a paycheck in our schools to be mentors and role models and influencers and forces for good in our kids’ lives. It’s not easy, I know. It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of ground-level engagement with the kids. Coaches have got to do more than say to their players, “Here’s a copy of the code of conduct. Read it and sign it, have your parents read it and sign it, and get it back to me by Friday so I can put it in my files.” They’ve got to preach that code. They’ve got to live that code themselves, and they’ve got to let their players see them as a living example of it. It should be regarded not just as a code of conduct but as a code of honor. Similarly, teachers in the classroom should be friendly with their students, but not buddies with them. They’ve got to set boundaries, to demand respect and earn trust and instill good citizenship every day along with their school subjects. This all sounds perfectly nerdy to many people, I’m sure, but it gets to the heart of what’s missing in our culture and what has driven a seemingly growing number of young adults today to the brink of a solipsistic void, where despondency is the only meaning to be found.Okay, I might be going a little off the rails now. The point is, kids that see no point in anything are among the most susceptible to destructive behaviors. I don’t know why our younger generations have a hard time with fundamental ideas like purpose and meaning, but if it’s something that we need to step up and deal with, then let’s get to it. Of course, even with all of that, it might not be enough. I hate to say it, but even the greatest among our educators won’t be able to get through to every single kid. Some of them simply aren’t ever going to say “no,” no matter how many opportunities you give them. Still, that doesn’t mean we don’t try.We need to be wary, though, about doing only what is expedient. We should not use an extreme policy as a crutch, clinging to it for dear life because it makes us feel good and provides us with cover so we don’t have to think so much about the real work that needs (to be) done. We must not justify any means to reach an end. That’s dangerous. In Policy 5013, there were shades of some of the sinister abuses of power that we see on a larger scale everywhere we look in government these days, and hints of the desperate “Do something! Do anything!” mentality that has fueled some of the ugliest instances of social activist extremism. You may think me hyperbolic here, but don’t forget that—for both good and bad—everything starts locally.More to the point, everything starts at home. Win, lose, or draw with our kids, we must acknowledge that schools don’t represent the beginning, the end, or even the entire middle of a young person’s development. A kid’s inability to succeed (in whatever way we define that) or to make good choices doesn’t fall entirely on the schools. How we’ve gotten to this point today where so many people think the schools should be held to account by parents for (their and their) students’ every need, I don’t know. It’s a sorry state of affairs. With my vote to rescind Policy 5013, though, I saw a chance to resist, to walk back (if ever so little) some of those steps that we’d taken in the wrong direction. In my vote, I saw my own opportunity to say “no” to some things. “No, we’re not going to engage in this kind of strong-arming of our students any longer. No, we’re not going to do this dirty work for parents just because they might find it too hard to do it themselves. No, we’re not going to keep up the façade of doing something to benefit our students when there are real things that can pay better dividends.”I saw my chance, and I took it. And although I too, like everyone, have made my share of bad choices in life, this wasn’t one of them.

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