... ABC7Chicago.com: High school to drug test all students... Starting next year, all the young men at St. Patrick's High School will be tested for drugs. Under the law, the private school can write its own rules. It will be the first school in Chicago to require drug testing for all students. School administrators say it is rare to find a student with a drug problem but they hope the mandatory testing will teach these young men to make better decisions in life
If it's rare, then why would you decide to demonstrate to every single student in your school that no, you don't trust them, and you don't think that without harrassment, they won't make good decisions? The plain fact is, most people don't use drugs. There is simply no reason to treat the students at large this way, except that they can because they're a private school.
It will be interesting to see how long it is before a public school -- probably in some smaller town where they have more direct control over the entire school system -- decides to test the Court's opinion by testing the entire student body. Of course, since they don't charge tuition, doing so will be considerably more problematic, since they'll have to pay the costs themselves. But somewhere, sometime soon, some small public school system will decide that it's worth it to so mistreat their students.
Posted by iain at December 05, 2003 11:19 AM