The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
No one should be surprised by the Flin Flon School Board's forced decision to back off its controversial proposal to test high-school students for drug and alcohol use. As I wrote in this space last spring, as soon as groups like the Manitoba Ombudsman's Office and the Manitoba Association for Rights and Liberties started voicing concerns, the concept was dead in the water. The Ombudsman's Office made it official this past December, sharing with the board its consequential opinion that such a policy would conflict with a piece of provincial legislation known as The Personal Health Information Act. The board could have stuck to its guns and implemented the policy anyway, but what would have been the point? This story garnered so much publicity that there was no doubt a long line of lawyers licking their lips at the prospect of leading a court challenge they surely would have won. So the trustees did the prudent thing and dropped the matter. Thus the existing school policy on drugs and alcohol, in which students can be penalized based only on the suspicion that they are under the influence, lives on. It's haphazard, particularly considering the many different drugs potentially available to today's teens, but it will have to do. With all of that said, was the board's idea that unreasonable? Contrary to what CBC and some other news outlets reported, the policy would not have involved random tests. No totalitarian figure was going to saunter through the hallways, casually pulling teens aside and forcing them to blow into a breathalyzer. Instead, a breathalyzer and saliva-based drug tests would have been used only to confirm an administrator's suspicion that a student is indeed drunk or stoned. And students would have retained the right to refuse testing (though this would have obviously made them appear guilty). How frequently would the tests have been employed? Probably not very often. In fact, at the crux of the proposal was the sensible notion that the mere availability of testing would serve as a deterrent to students. How could it not? Everyone can agree that the fewer students who go to school under the influence, the better. Such behaviour violates school policy (and in the case of street drugs, the law), harms the academic performance of offending students, and normalizes substance abuse among an impressionable student body. The question is, how do you tackle the problem? Applied responsibly, drug and alcohol testing would have been a very useful deterrent. And by reliably identifying those students who are on drugs or alcohol, administrators could have doled out not only punishments, but also offered help to teens who perhaps suffer from an addiction. Unfortunately, this ended up being just another case of distant bureaucrats knowing best. While we're on the subject, why did it take the Ombudsman's Office in excess of six months to figure out that the board's proposal was illegal? The Ombudsman met with the trustees to discuss the matter at length last May 25, but did not inform the board of its decision until December. Ensuring compliance with privacy legislation, including The Personal Health Information Act, is a key role of the Ombudsman. Surely these people know (or should know) the law frontwards and backwards, inside and out. The board's proposal was not exactly complicated, and its conflict with the Act should have been almost immediately obvious to anyone with a reasonable understanding of the law. The fact that the trustees and the public had to wait so long for the Ombudsman's decision raises a whole other set of concerns. Local Angle runs Fridays.
