First public meeting on new VCHS drug policy is next Thursday

Students who plan to participate in extracurricular activities at Vandalia Community High School now will be subject to random drug and alcohol testing.
That policy, adopted by the district board of education at its April meeting, expands the previous policy from athletics to all extracurricular activities – which are defined as “any activity where students represent Vandalia CUSD #203 voluntarily and for which no academic credit or grades are rewarded.”
Those activities include all IHSA-recognized activities, student council, National Honor Society, the school play, clubs, etc.
“We’ve always had the athletic code,” said VCHS Principal Randy Protz, “but with the extracurricular handbook, we are expanding it to extracurricular activities, too.
“We want to be proactive; we want to give kids one more reason to say ‘no’ when confronted with opportunities to try drugs or alcohol.”
The policy is initiated when a student signs up to participate in an extracurricular activity. If the student refuses to sign the consent form, they will not be allowed to participate.
They may be tested at the beginning of each season or each activity, or they may be tested randomly during the remainder of the year, including the school months. Participating students – who are identified only by their student ID number – will be added to a list from which five numbers will be randomly drawn for testing each week during the school year.
Testing will be done through a urinalysis evaluation by an outside laboratory.
Samples will be tested for alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cocaine, marijuana, methadone, methaqualone, opiates, phencyclidine, propoxyphene and anabolic steroids.
To make sure all students and parents understand the new policy, several presentations will be held in the coming months to explain the changes. The first of those meetings will be next Thursday at 6 p.m. in the high school gymnasium.
“This is a positive step for our kids, our schools and our community,” said Superintendent Rich Well. “Several districts around the state are going this direction. It places a higher expectation on students, and the board sees it as a way to help kids in our community. It can be a factor in changing the culture among our students.”
A 16-page handbook outlining the new policies for extracurricular participants was produced after school board members and administrators visited schools in Carterville and Freeburg.
“What we adopted was a combination of those two schools’ policies,” Protz said. “But we did change some verbiage and we localized it to our district.
“More and more districts are going to policies like this. Everyone in the South Central Conference has an athletic code, but we might be the first in the conference to have a random drug and alcohol testing program for all of our extracurricular participants.
“From the educational side, drugs and alcohol are detrimental to the body and to the learning process. We want to prepare the students to make good decisions when they get out in the real world.”
In addition to the random testing, the policy states that the district reserves the right to “test any extracurricular participant at any time where reasonable suspicion is found to exist.”
After testing takes place, the only persons who will be informed of the results are the student, his/her parents or guardian, the school nurse, the principal, the athletic director and the head coach or activity sponsor.
The policy establishes a series of increasingly severe sanctions for the first offense, second offense and third offense, with the third offense resulting in the student being ineligible to participate in extracurricular activities during the remainder of their time as a student in the district.
Students and their parents who wish to appeal an extracurricular code violation or disciplinary action will be able to do so by contacting the high school principal.
A copy of the extracurricular handbook will be placed on the school district’s website by the end of this week, Protz said. That website is: www.vcs.fayette.k12.il.us.