A little more than a year ago, administrators with Ohio County Schools were collecting opinions on a possible drug testing program for Wheeling Park High School students who participated in extracurricular activities such as athletics and the performing arts.
According to Assistant Superintendent Rick Jones, those opinions were heard very loudly and very clearly.
“We actually have not talked about it since the beginning of the pandemic,” Jones reported. “We did have a lot of discussion about it prior to Covid, and we had a lot of pros and cons, and some people were for it, and others were against it. To be honest, the reaction we received was not what I expected.
“I really did believe that at least 95 percent of the people would be in favor of the testing, but a lot of people in our community were very much against it,” he said. “We do our best to listen to the community, so I had a lot of conversations with a lot of people, and I did much more research based on those opinions.”
The Tide Turned
Initially, the drug testing program did not involve suspensions from classes or the extracurricular activity, but it did call for mandated education for the pupils that tested positive for a narcotic or alcohol. The program’s development, in fact, did not progress past that point because of the input offered by experts, parents, and county taxpayers.
“I also had several more conversations with other experts in the field of drug testing on the high school level and learned that the testing might not be the best way,” Jones explained. “In the middle of all of that controversy, Covid arrived in Ohio County, so those conversations pretty much stopped, and it’s really not been a topic ever since.
“Not talking about it for a long while, I feel, is what really needed to happen,” the assistant superintendent said. “And, right now, I don’t know if that topic will come up again after we heard the opinions of parents and others in this area, and after so much research was conducted. I believe everyone is still concerned about the amount of drug abuse that has continued here in the area, but not a lot of people were in favor of the program.”
One of the primary reasons why Jones feels Superintendent Dr. Kim Miller will not recommend the program to the Ohio County Board of Education is that public opinion and research indicated to him, to the coaches and staff members, and to administrators that there is a better way to deter high school students from making poor choices involving drugs and alcohol.
“At the time the virus closed down all of the schools, we were leaning against implementing it anyway, and that’s because experts were against it, a lot of parents were against it, and a lot of taxpayers in Ohio County were, too,” Jones revealed. “One expert I spoke to was 100 percent positive that education is by far the best way to detract our students from using drugs and alcohol.
“And punitive things, they insisted, do not work and haven’t worked for a long time,” he continued. “When I was having those discussions, I really started to lean toward not implementing it because maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. There would have been some costs, and a lot of protocols would have to have been put into place, and from what we learned, it just didn’t seem as if the benefits would be there.”
An Ever-So-Slight Pulse
Over the past two weeks, Ohio County Sheriff Tom Howard confirmed that multiple overdoses had taken place in the city of Wheeling and Ohio County, and a few deaths were recorded, as well. This past Sunday, in fact, the Ohio County Emergency Management Agency transmitted a public awareness text reporting the overdoses to those who have subscribed to the alert system.
“They send those texts in hope that addicts will be more careful than usual when they are making their buys,” Howard said. “No one is naïve enough to believe the addicted won’t go find their next fix, but maybe if they hear there is a bad batch out there, they will be, I guess, more skeptical when they buy.
“This community has been dealing with this issue for several years now, and I hate to say it, but I don’t see this ending anytime soon,” the sheriff said. “It started with the opioids, but now there’re many more drugs like meth and fentanyl here. In many ways, it’s just getting worse.”
And that is why Assistant Superintendent Jones is unable to refer to the proposed drug testing program in the future as “dead.”
“It might come up again, but there’s a good chance it will not. It does depend though,” he said. “As of now, it’s not on the table, and trust me; we did a lot of work to learn as much as we could. Plus, there are so many other issues right now to deal with after the year that our students, their parents, and our employees have experienced. At least for us, this pandemic has been unprecedented, and right now the most important thing for us to is get our students prepared for their next steps.
“We’re just concerned with keeping the kids back in the classrooms and vaccinated right now, so implementing a drug testing program just seems like the last thing anyone in Ohio County Schools should be thinking about right now,” Jones added. “It may come up, but I will say that it’s on the back burner and barely on simmer right now.”
