North Greene makes changes to drug testing policy

By Editor | July 31, 2025 |

By Carmen Ensinger

Last month, the North Greene School District began discussions about the district’s drug testing policy and at this month’s meeting, they made some adjustments to that policy.
North Greene Superintendent Jackie Kuchy said there were a couple of reasons the district chose to take a closer look at the policy.
“First of all, it is a significant cost to the district,” she said. “It costs us just under $10,000 a year to test 10 students a month. Plus, the pool of students had significantly grown. Our goal was to decide if it was serving its intention and if it was responsible and sustainable.”
According to Kuchy, 10 random students were chosen each month and those students had to leave the classroom, go to the restroom and provide a urine sample to be sent off for testing.
“One of our concerns was the time some students would be removed from the educational setting,” she said. “They have to test if their name is called and if they can’t use the bathroom at that time they have to sit and wait until they can. It was an interruption to the learning environment.”
The board explored several options and the one change they are making is that they are going from 10 students a month down to five. They are also going to change the form of the test.
“We decided we are going to do the mouth swab instead of the urine test,” Kuchy said. “It is a lot quicker and less disruptive to the educational setting.”
Also refined was which students would be considered eligible to be included in the pool for testing.
“We needed to clarify in our policy just which students would be included in the pool,” Kuchy said. “Now, only students who participate in activities that compete on behalf of the district are going to be subject to the drug testing. For example, student council members wouldn’t have to be in the pool because they do not compete against any other district. However, FFA and Scholastic Bowl would be included because they represent the district in a competitive arena.”
In the past, both the school play and student council had been included in the pool.
“It has always been a little confusing so we are just trying to clean up the implementation of the program and make sure our pool isn’t diluted with names of kids who actually aren’t even participating anymore.”
For example, a student who may have played basketball in seventh grade might not decide to compete when they get to the high school level. Students in seventh through 12th grade are subject to testing if they compete in any arena on behalf of the district.
So, what happens if a student does test positive?
“If they test positive, then the district’s Code of Conduct applies to them,” Kuchy said. “There is no school discipline should they test positive and they are given the opportunity to test at a later time. It is meant to be a deterrent and not to get kids in trouble.”