Pubdate: Tue, 25 Mar 2003
Source: Times-Picayune, The (LA)
Copyright: 2003 The Times-Picayune
Contact:  http://www.nola.com/t-p/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/848

BREAKING TAMMANY'S TABOO

St. Tammany school officials have agreed to allow students to be surveyed 
about drug and alcohol use in the fall in response to a federal mandate, 
and that's a step forward for a school district that shot down the idea in 
the past.

But the St. Tammany sixth-, eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders won't fill out 
the same state-commissioned survey that students in every other school 
district in Louisiana will answer. Instead, they'll be taking another 
survey, Smart Track, which School Board members deemed less intrusive.

That's unfortunate. The state's Department of Health and Hospitals Office 
of Addictive Disorders uses the biennial drug survey data to help design 
prevention programs. Because St. Tammany's survey will be different, its 
data won't be as useful in that effort.

Allen Ward, program manager for the Office of Addictive Disorders, said 
that the Smart Track test doesn't provide as much information about the age 
of first use or about underlying causes of substance abuse. Those are 
shortcomings that could hamper St. Tammany officials in finding effective 
prevention strategies.

Questions in the Smart Track survey are not as detailed as those in the 
state-sponsored Communities That Care Youth Survey. The state survey, for 
example, asks students to check categories for frequency of use for alcohol 
and various drugs that range from never and one to two times on the low end 
to more than 40 on the high end. The Smart Track questionnaire provides 
more generalized categories such as "never," "seldom," "sometimes," 
"frequently" and "often."

But the fuzzier nature of the Smart Track poll is what appealed to St. 
Tammany officials. Some School Board members have suggested that the state 
survey could leave students with the impression that heavy drug use is normal.

It's difficult to see the difference between suggesting that drugs might be 
used "often" or that they might be used 40 times. Both are clearly an 
extreme. Moreover, the fear that such questions will be perceived as an 
endorsement just isn't reasonable.

In 2000, the last time the St. Tammany School Board rejected the state 
test, board members objected to questions dealing with students' family 
life and domestic violence. The Smart Track test was deemed more acceptable 
because it didn't probe those issues as deeply.

But home environment is certainly a valid area to explore in trying to 
understand why young people turn to substance abuse. It's also an area that 
should be of concern to school officials and state health officials.

The School Board's unwillingness to participate in past surveys has meant 
that schools and parents haven't had reliable information on how widespread 
drug and alcohol use is among students. That kind of ignorance is 
dangerous, and it's distressing that it took the threat of a loss in 
federal money -- to the tune of $4 million -- to persuade the School Board 
to explore student drug and alcohol use.

But perhaps the Smart Track test will help St. Tammany officials overcome 
their jitters and in another two years, they'll be ready to fall in line 
with the rest of the state.
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MAP posted-by: Alex