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De Soto USD 232 Board of Education President Janine Gracy said when looking at student drug testing research, it is important to be informed.

"Most of the journals that I have read that say it doesn't work usually preface it by saying as the only prevention strategy that, no, it doesn't work," she said. "You have to have a comprehensive strategic plan that would include education, that would include treatment and referral."

A federally-funded study cited in The New York Times said there was no sign that drug testing deters students' drug use. The study was published in May 2003 in The Journal of School Health. The study found that 37 percent of 12th-graders in schools that performed drug-testing said they had smoked marijuana in the last year compared to 36 percent in schools that did not.

Dr. Lloyd D. Johnston, a study researcher from the University of Michigan, wrote that findings from the study support that students' attitudes toward drugs did not change because schools implemented drug-testing. Johnston also is one of the principal investigators for Monitoring the Future, which is an ongoing study assessing behaviors and attitudes, including drug use, of American secondary school students, college students and young adults. Monitoring the Future has been funded by a series of research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and its results are routinely used in the White House Strategy on Drug Abuse.

Methods questioned

However, Johnston's research findings sparked disagreements from another drug-testing expert.

Dr. Robert L. DuPont, president of the Institute for Behavior and Health and first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, published a commentary in response to the research in which he criticized the surveyors' method in gathering and comparing data. DuPont also said to his knowledge it had never been implied that student drug testing would be an ideal drug prevention program for any school.

"The policy question facing schools today is whether adding well-structured, non-punitive student drug testing deters illegal drug use and helps parents and students find and use effective help earlier in the cycle of drug dependence," he said in his commentary.

Corinne Shea, project assistant for the Institute for Behavior and Health, which DuPont created, said there are very few research studies on student drug testing programs and many of them claim that drug testing does not reduce drug use in schools.

However, she cautioned that it is difficult to prove causality in any research study because of outside factors.

"I think one of the most important things to stress when it comes to student drug testing is that the results are very much dependent on the process," Shea said. "It is the process that needs to be researched: How often will a school randomly test for drugs? How many students are in the testing pool? What percentage of the student body will actually be tested each year? All of these things have a significant impact on the usefulness and results of a student drug testing program."

Testing worked in Illinois, principal says

Joe Sabatino, superintendent of Community High School District 117 in Lake Villa, Ill., said reported drug use declined after the district implemented student drug testing.

"Before we started drug testing we were giving students surveys," he said. "Four years later students were coding significantly less use of drugs."

Gracy, a member of the committee studying random student drug testing, said her professional opinion was that drug testing can reduce instances of drug use.

Gracy is the director of the Regional Prevention Center of Johnson, Leavenworth and Miami counties.

"The NCAA has been testing their athletes for several years now and they have found that it really does deter drug use," she said.

Gracy said the district does have a drug-use policy in place, however the drug-testing committee could propose some changes to that policy.

"We need to sit down and look and see exactly what we have in place, what we feel is working and what is not, and then combine that with drug testing," she said.