Grades 7-12
Project ID Voluntary
Drug Testing Program
Auburn City Schools
The
Independent Decision (ID) Program aims to reinforce a positive drug free
lifestyle by providing incentives to 7th
through 12th grade students who refrain from using drugs. Students
who are in the program and do not test positive for drugs become eligible for
rewards. Students participating in
the program agree to undergo random drug screening. The ID program is voluntary.
Students may discontinue the program, with written parental request,
at any time. Students who withdraw from the program will not be eligible
for further incentives for the remaining school year.
All drug testing analyses will be performed at East Alabama
Medical Center’s Forensic Toxicology Laboratory.
Students participating in the ID program will be randomly selected and
notified to report to a designated site at his or her school to provide a urine
specimen for drug testing. Trained
EAMC personnel, under split-specimen collection guidelines, will perform all
specimen collections. The entire
process, from specimen collection through specimen analysis and reporting of
results, will be performed in a professional manner with emphasis on maintaining
student confidentiality. EAMC will
use the students’ identification numbers to randomly select the students for
testing. The testing laboratory,
however, will use unique specimen identification numbers that have been matched
to the identification numbers by the system coordinator to identify the urine
specimens during the testing and for reporting results.
All analyses performed on the specimens will follow strict forensic
laboratory guidelines using state of the art equipment for both the screening,
and if necessary, confirmation of drugs. Students’
ID program files are maintained in a secure file at the central office and will
be kept separated from permanent student records.
All students in the program are eligible to be tested at any time.
All drug screen results will be forwarded directly from the testing laboratory
to the Medical Review Officer (MRO), a medical physician designated by EAMC.
Results of negative drug screens will be reported directly to the system
coordinator by the MRO without contacting the student or his/her parents.
In the event of a positive test result, the MRO will contact the parents
of the student to determine whether the positive test result was due to legal or
illegal use of the reported substance. If
a positive drug result is verified by the MRO to be a result of legal drug use,
the MRO will contact the system coordinator and report the results of the
analyses as NEGATIVE. If, however,
a positive drug result cannot be verified to be a result of legal drug use, the
MRO will contact the system coordinator and report the results of the analyses
as POSITIVE. The system coordinator
will notify the student and the parent privately, offering information on
outside counseling and treatment. In
order to re-enter the program, successful completion of an outside counseling
program and re-testing with a negative test result will be required.
The amount and intensity of the treatment will be determined by the MRO.
The student will also be asked to surrender the ID card and/or will not
be eligible for further incentives, until a negative test result is obtained on
subsequent urine specimens. All
requests for additional testing must be directed through the MRO and not
directed to the testing laboratory. The un-opened split container of urine will be utilized for
the purposes of re-testing in the event of any challenge. A parent may challenge any confirmed positive result.
Any additional testing performed will be at the parents’ expense.
It is important to emphasize that the purpose of
the program is to reward positive, healthy behaviors. Students who are taking
prescribed medications are encouraged to participate. Testing of drugs in the ID
Program is in no way an
investigative tool of a law enforcement agency. Positive results will not
result in criminal prosecution.
Research
and Evaluation
In order to have ongoing evaluation,
the ID Program will study student drug testing programs in the middle school,
junior high and high schools of Auburn City Schools.
Spectrum Consulting will conduct the evaluation through their research.
There will be two basic types of data collected for research purposes in this
study. The information on student
drug testing will be provided to Spectrum Consulting by the system in an
aggregate form on a monthly basis and will contain absolutely no student
identifiers of any kind. For
example, each month the system will provide data on how many drug tests were
conducted and what the results of those tests were with a breakdown by
ethnicity, sex, and grade in school, but nothing on who was tested. The other type of data to be collected is an annual survey
data of the entire student population at each school. These surveys will ask questions on student drug use and
related beliefs and attitudes, but will not contain any individual student
identifiers of any kind. They
will be completely anonymous surveys using a survey instrument that has been
used for needs assessments at each of the participating schools in previous
years. Thus, the research team will
never be given any data that identifies any individual student and will conduct
analyses of drug testing data and survey data that is aggregate in nature.