Lander School Board to consider changes to new drug testing policy for students in extracurricular activities

(Lander, WY) – The Lander School Board is planning to consider several potential changes to the new drug testing policy it adopted in 2023 for students involved in extracurricular activities.

They reviewed the policy during a regular meeting this week, when Superintendent Mike Harris reported that Fremont County School District 1 has spent $46,934 on 1,514 drug tests associated with the new policy.

Only seven of those tests came back positive, Harris said, prompting “questions (about) the efficacy of spending this amount of money on testing for the return of half a percentage of positive tests.”

Time

Harris also shared concerns that have been expressed about the new policy’s impact on instructional time for students, who have had to leave class in order to be tested for drugs. 

“The instructional time losses (are) equating to some reteaching for kids who are out for key moments in the day or need to retake an assessment … because they’ve been pulling for testing,” Harris said, noting that the change also has an impact on teachers’ time.

Other staff members have had to dedicate extra hours to the new policy too, Harris said, estimating that the district activities director now spends about 25 percent of his time on testing.

Front office staff like nurses, secretaries, and principals also spend time “calling kids down, supervising in the commons area, supervising bathrooms, (and) working with the testing company to collect specimens and get them labeled and sent off,” Harris said.

‘Reduce the scope’

Regardless, Harris said, “no one is in favor of scrapping the drug testing program,” which “provides a valuable incentive for kids to choose to not participate in drugs and alcohol.”

Instead, he suggested limiting the scope of the policy, which currently requires students in grades six through 12 to take one drug test for every activity they participate in, then submit to random drug testing throughout the season.

As a result, he said, “if you have a middle school student who participates in every sports season, that’s five initial tests that are required for those activities, plus they’re in the pool for random testing.”

He recommended “maintaining that random (testing) component” but “eliminating the 100 percent testing” requirement for every student in every activity in order to “reduce the scope” of the testing program.

Other questions

There has also been “some discussion” about whether random drug testing should occur outside of an activity’s season, Harris said.

“Some of our administrators feel that out of season is not appropriate,” he explained. “Others … still feel that random testing out of season is appropriate as a deterrent, but maybe (we could) differentiate percentages that we’re drawing to create those pools on the random side.”

In addition, Harris said some people have proposed removing sixth and seventh graders from the drug testing requirement due to the younger students’ “trepidation about the drug testing process and what’s required to provide a sample.”

“A lot of kids have been really nervous, (and) we’ve heard that there’s some kids that don’t want to participate in activities because of that,” he said.

Finally, Harris said there are a couple of “inconsistencies” in the policy “that definitely need to be corrected.” 

For example, he said one part of the policy indicates that students who quit an activity should be removed from the random drug testing pool, while another section says “they can be removed, but they have to sign a form.”

“We did have one incident this year where a student quit but was still in the random pool, and there was some confusion about what was going on there,” he said. “So I’m just clearing that up.”

The other discrepancy has to do with appeals, Harris said, explaining that the district code of conduct indicates athletes can’t participate in their activities during appeals, but the drug testing policy says they can.

“This has not come up, because we’ve not had an appeal,” Harris noted. “But it’s likely in the future that it would, (so) my recommendation would be to align both documents with the current code of conduct, which would be no participation during an appeal.”

The board asked Harris to prepare an official recommendation for proposed updates to the new drug testing policy, which they plan to consider at a future meeting.

They also asked him to present more information about any recorded changes in the number of students participating in extracurricular activities since the policy was adopted. 

For more information, call FCSD 1 at (307) 332-4711.