During this week’s Park City School Board meeting, a draft policy of the district’s proposed drug policy was presented. While drug testing for Park City students has not been approved, now is the time to provide any objections. One of our major concerns is student privacy.

The district policy describes who will have the results of the drug testing. It says:

• Information regarding the results of the drug tests shall be kept confidential among the building principal, designees, any employee with a need to know, the student’s parent or legal guardian, and the student.

Unfortunately, nowhere in the draft policy does is mention the word privacy. The only time it speak to confidentiality of results is the above bullet point.

Let us give you an example of our fear. Let’s say Johnny Smith plays wide receiver for the Miners Football team. On Monday he gets pulled out of class for a random drug test. He fails. He is then suspended for two football games. Sure, officially only the Principal, the Assistant Principal, a school counselor, and his coaches know that he has been suspended for failing a drug test. However, it doesn’t take a genius for his classmates to figure out he failed a test (why isn’t he playing in these two games?). Then various people at school turn to social media and post that Johnny failed his drug test. Then the whole school knows. Then so do colleges that wanted to recruit Johnny for football … or maybe it’s the college admission officer who is reviewing his application for Westminster.

We just don’t see how the school can protect our students’ privacy. They can’t outlaw freedom of speech — especially when it’s true. We don’t have to look much farther than last year’s security scare at the high school, to see how fast and far social media spreads.

Messing with kids’ lives in order to have the appearance of “doing something” is a horrible approach. We hope the school district stops this madness immediately.

As the Park City School District moves closer to drug testing our students, there’s one group adamantly opposed to the idea. It turns out that the American Academy of Pediatrics “opposes in school drug testing due to lack of evidence.” In fact they created a policy paper and technical report on it. Their main concerns?

1. Limited evidence of efficacy
2. Decreased participation in sports
3. Breach of confidentiality
4. Increases in use of substances not included on testing panels
5. Increases in the number of students facing disciplinary action (whether official or not)

We find #4 interesting. During an interview on KPCW, Superintendent Ember Conley noted that drug tests don’t screen for synthetic drugs, which is the type of drug that allegedly took the life of two students in Park City recently. Does drug testing just drive other kids to those same dangerous, synthetic drugs because they won’t be caught?

Perhaps the better question is if your child’s pediatrician recommended something for your kid, wouldn’t you do it? Then why are we going to ignore their recommendation this time?

This morning on KPCW, Park City School Board member Julie Eihausen made a comment about new 5/6 and 7/8 grade schools. KPCW’s Leslie Thatcher asked Ms. Eihausen whether we were still going forward with those new schools, especially in light of some potential new board members stating a preference for K-6 schools.

Ms Eihausen commented that the board had voted for the new schools last year and that’s what was going to happen, in some form or fashion (i.e. two schools or one 5-8 campus, etc.) somewhere. She said it would take a vote of the board to rescind that directive. She also said she would be hard-pressed to change her mind.

We thought that directive likely died with the school bond, but it appears not. We wonder if the new school board will at least want to discuss whether plans made by different people, in a different place, that were essentially struck down by the public, are still valid.