Reasonable enough. It was just an angry rant at first, but I’ll get more focused.
I think it’s too intrusive to test all students. And it’s wrong to treat us like small children, most of us Seniors are legal adults. I know we’re not “adults” with regards to alcohol, but I still think we should have our privacy respected.
It’s similar to random drug testing for athletes. I know the drugs they are testing for are not legal. But I think it’s wrong to subject random or blanket suspicionless drug or alcohol tests. It is intrusive and degrading.
I see it as a slippery slope. We implement ever increasingly intrusive little things like this that “nobody minds” until we are treated as suspects for everything. That’s not the path I want to go down.
I’d like to qualify this by saying that I still think it would be wrong even if we weren’t mostly adults. Minors are still people too, and deserve a modicum of dignity. Students should not have to be suspects without cause.
Perhaps, instead of calling the police first, their parents, or other responsible adult, could be called, and the student made to wait in another room until they arrived to take the student home. If the parents did not respond, or were disinterested, the police could be called as a last resort. Kids will be kids, after all, and I’d hate to give a young person a police record. I know it was their behavior that caused the problem, but it still strikes me as a bit extreme to have them arrested.
Ah, and that is a very reasonable position… but I disagree.
See, I think in this case, the liability and responsibility of the school is such that it can’t take chances. A parent can do what he or she wants in regards to his or her children (and while you or your classmates may be 18, you’re still children under the law while you are living under your parents’ care), but the school can afford no such luxury. If even one kid reports to one parent that some other kid was drunk at the prom, the school could get in a lot of trouble. Even if nothing bad or life-threatening happens to anyone.
I agree that testing everyone for BAC at the door is kind of insulting, but if the school feels it’s necessary, I’d have a hard time arguing against it.
I chose not to work at Burger King because of their drug testing policy. I actually got into a fight with my stepmom over this too. They wanted ME to pay $20 for a piss test. I didn’t have 20 dollars on my person at the time. It was kind of retarded, what if I was homeless and NEEDED a job? I couldn’t get it because I couldn’t afford to take a urine test.
All that policy does is hurt people rather than help them. I think employers should be prohibited from testing prospective employees for unskilled jobs (like flipping burgers) for drugs and excluding them on that basis alone. But that is straying away from the original topic.
Blalron, it does suck being suspect for no reason. As magog says, it doesn’t end after high school.
And you know, the more I think about this, the more I think I would be peeved if my kid came home and said that he or she had to take a breathalyzer test “just because.” So, maybe I agree with you a little more than I thought at first.
Why not test us whenever we go to football games, or basketball games, or wrestling tournaments, or swim meets, or cross country running meets, or soccer, or baseball, or golf matches?
Why not give us a breathalyzer every time we walk into the door when we go to school, If as you said, the school could be held accountable?
Straying further away, the drug-free policy is probably in place to ensure that their employees don’t bring said drugs into the workplace. Bad for business and everything. I’ve had two drug tests, both for more professional jobs.
What Eonwe said makes sense…I can see the school’s position, but it is an “assumed guilty” situation. Not that prom is that major of a sacrifice IMHO - kind of like the drug test for a crappy job.
Well, that’s true… but I think the issue here is that people traditionally drink on prom night. So, it’s a much higher risk event, and higher risk of drinking and driving, then at a normal day of school. Just because there’s a “slippery slope,” doesn’t mean one shouldn’t do things. Afterall, just about anything can begin a slippery slope to somewhere awful.
Regarding random drug tests of high school student athletes:
I think it’s a ridiculous invasion of privacy, although the Supreme Court disagrees. They have good intentions, but I despise the “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then what’s your problem?” argument against personal privacy. I think there should at least be probable cause before they test someone.
At our high school, we were informed of the rationale behind the “Drunk at a dance? You go home in a cop car” policy by our biology teacher. She told us it was because there had been cases where students had been turned away at the door and proceeded to wander around school property, where they died of hypothermia. The alcohol they drank made their blood vessels dilate, allowing their blood to rush to the surface of their skin. The cold air constricted their vessels again, trapping the blood near their skin and far from their organs, where it was most needed. At least one student (a boy who was found on an athletic field, I think), died this way. Not to mention Eonwe’s scenario.
Besides, being escorted home by the cops doesn’t mean you’ll be arrested, or have a record. They might not even write you up for underage drinking. My brother and his buddies got caught drinking underage and the police officer purposefully made a mistake on the ticket, then “strongly suggested” to him that he contest it in front of the J.P. He took her suggestion, the J.P. took one look at the ticket, tossed it away and let my brother off with a “I don’t want to see you in front of me again, young man.”
The chemistry of how breathalyzers work. Short version–it’s testing for alcohol. Halitosis doesn’t produce alcohol, just sulfur compounds, which the device doesn’t test for.
I hate to say this, Blaron, but unless you’d be turned down because you came to the prom drunk, this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Background checks and drug checks for jobs? So what? If you have nothing to hide, it isn’t hampering you.
As for smoking, I find it apalling that your school even permitted smoking on school grounds at any point- I only wish my college could be smoke-free since as a nonsmoker I can’t stand being around people smoking, and nobody enforces the ‘15 feet away from the building’ rule.
When I was in High School, the paper had an article about how the administration was going to do random drug screenings on students. A lot of students freaked out and very openly objected to it. I on the other hand thought it was a great idea. I didn’t do drugs, so I would have no problems submitting to a drug test. It later turned out to be an april fool’s joke, but I often contemplated how many people would get caught if they did the screenings.
We live in a day and age where you can’t excersize innocence merely by good faith and trust- innocence has to be proven.
