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Teacher drug test barred
Published Saturday, May 30, 2009
BATON ROUGE (AP) — A court settlement Friday will bar a Louisiana school board from requiring teachers to submit to ‘‘suspicionless’’ drug tests after an accident or injury.
The settlement resolves a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union helped bring against the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board on behalf of the local teachers union.
The school board said its policy language didn’t require teachers to submit to drug and alcohol tests after being injured on the job without reasonable suspicion of intoxication. But the district allegedly imposed the tests on some teachers in spite of the written policy.
‘‘The resolution of this case is a victory for teachers not only in Baton Rouge but around the country,’’ said Adam Wolf, a California-based attorney for the ACLU.
Peggy Reno, a teacher at the parish’s Mohican Education Center, had filed a separate lawsuit that claims she was forced to submit to a drug test after a student punched her last September, even though she wasn’t suspected of drug use.
Yigal Bander, a lawyer for both Reno and the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers, said he hopes Friday’s settlement prompts the school board to ‘‘fess up to its mistake’’ and also resolve Reno’s case.
A lawyer for the school board didn’t immediately return a call for comment Friday.
Comments
Posted by happyreader (anonymous) on May 30, 2009 at 6:01 a.m. (Suggest removal)
You know, on one hand, I've always felt like a person shouldn't object to taking a workplace drug screen test at any time if he or she has nothing to hide. On the other hand, I didn't know until recently (when this happened to a friend of mine) that you can actually fail a drug screen test because of certain prescription medicines - and they're not just pain meds, either. If this happens to you, then the burden is on you to produce evidence that this is why you failed the test, and there's sort of a shadow of suspicion over you until you do.
Sooo... I'm glad that the court has taken this position. It's bad enough for someone to get hurt on the job through no fault of their own, much less to possibly go through having to defend their good name.
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