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Carlito
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WUSD approves lab for student drug-testing
11/30/06 07:38 PM
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http://www.willcoxrangenews.com/articles/2006/11/28/news/news2.txt
WUSD approves lab for student drug-testing
The Willcox School district is in the final stages of instituting drug testing of its students after the school board approved Southwest Laboratories of Phoenix as its potential contractor on Nov. 7.
Sonja Hoppe, a vice president of the Lab, assured school board members that they have extremely effective safeguards against fraudulent urine samples. Southwest also promised quick turnaround of test results to confirm positive or negative results for the presence of illegal drugs.
Urine samples will be temperature checked, Hoppe said, and must fit a tight range to qualify as a legitimate sample. The lab also has high tech equipment to check for masking agents that can attempt to alter the results. The district plans to test no more than 100 students this school year, said superintendent Dr. Donald Roberts, at a cost of $16.25 per test or a total of $1,625 to the district. Southwest Labs will also perform the drug testing for the adult population of the district's transportation department at a similar cost.
The labs costs are just one portion of the expense for the program. The district will pay for mailing samples to the lab and for the cost of training and hiring an on-campus collector to administer the testing.
The district will utilize the Drug Panel 130 test, which screens for meth, marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, barbiturates, codeine, morphine, ecstasy, soma, alcohol (recent use and minimum .05 percent level) and other current popular drugs of choice in the current culture, Roberts said.
The tests will not screen for steroids, which have rated as a low concern on local surveys of drug abuse, Roberts said.
"We will change the panel of drugs to be screened if surveys about the drugs of choice in our local youth culture should change," Roberts said.
Although the drug-screening of a student will be as confidential as possible in a private on-campus site, the subject will sit and watch their specimen sealed in a pouch with their identification numbers applied to the two specimen bottles.
The specimens should reach the lab the next morning, said Hoppe, where same-day testing will be applied in a two-step process. The lab will add an anti-body chemical to check for drug presence. If positive, a second step of the lab process would be to use a technique that verifies what kind of chemical is present and whether it's an over-the-counter or illegal drug.
"A medical review officer gets the positive result, likely the next day, but it isn't reported yet to the district," said Hoppe. "The officer will contact parents to check for a valid medical reason for that positive test, and if there's no clear explanation, then it will be reported to the district."
School board vice-president Mike Moss proposed the motion that the district be allowed to negotiate with Southwest Labs as the drug-testing contractor, which was approved unanimously by the rest of the board.
Roberts said he would come prepared to the Dec. 5 board meeting with a detailed plan on how to implement the tests and the kind of action the district would take to respond to positive test results.
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