Issues of drugs use in public schools Research Paper

Issues of drugs use in public schools - Research Paper Example The second sub-question is the rules and regulation that might be needed to guide the processing of identifying drug users among teachers and students. The other sub-question is how the effectiveness of a drug identificationtechnique chosen could be improved. Analysis in this researchis based on these sub-questions. The research concludes that none of the drug identification techniques is sufficient; it therefore recommends use of other drug identification techniques before deciding to undertake drug testing among teachers and students in public schools. CHAPTER 1: Introduction Context of the problem Drug use in public schools has been identified as a key issue affecting education in this country. Principals and other education administrators have found students in their schools using or in possession of illegal drugs like marijuana (Samaha, 2012). Moreover, there are teachers and other school employees who have been foundusing drugs by the school administrators while in their line o f duty. Therefore, the issue of drug use is a problem that affects the whole public schools fraternity. In the past, students were tested for drug use only when participating in athletics or when undertaking major co-curricular activities (Dempsey, 2011). This proved to be ineffective since the majority of drug users turned to be the idle students who did not engage in any form of sports or co-curricular activities. Furthermore, drug users tended to avoid sports and co-curricular activities to avoid being tested for drug use. However, recently a random drug test routinehas been introduced in the majority of public schools in this country. According to Leonard (2011), this approach of testing drug use has been providing great promises both as a preventive tool for drug use and as a means of reducing the costs of drug use in the society.However, teachers and other members of the public schoolfraternityare not included in this drug testing process. Drug use in public schools has severa l negative effects. Gasper (2009) identifies the issue as one of the major causes of students dropping out of schools. This is because of the fact that it could make the students feel unfit for the learning environment provided in public schools. It is also related to social problems like lack of discipline in schools, premarital sex, and spread of STIs (Ryan & Cooper, 2008). This indicates that if allowed to increase, it would result to increase in these identified social problems. Drug testing is one way of identifying drug users in public schools. As a policy, it requires that the test results be kept in confidential files and be released to educationpersonnel only when needed (Alexander & Alexander, 2011). However, very few school administrators meet what this policy requires. This results in violations of people’s privacy and victimization of students in public schools.Such outcomes have motivated human rights advocates to propose that drug education should be employed i nstead of drug testing. According to Wilson and Kolander (2011), drug education encompasses all activities aimed at teaching and communicating issues related to drug use to people in order to assist them in avoiding such harm. This might eliminate the negative effects of drug testing and yet achieve the required results in terms of