Minor children shouldn’t be using any sort of drugs or medications without parental approval and medical guidance, legal or otherwise. And yet, in rural communities across America – and other places, too – use of drugs without sound medical guidance is a scourge for adults, and sometimes minors.
The Whitewater Schools’ district administrator, Dr. Mark Elworthy, posted about a drug search on Facebook last week:
A message from Mark Elworthy, District Administrator.
May 4, 2018This morning Whitewater High School was placed into a Hold/ Lock for about 40 minutes while the Whitewater Police Department, Walworth County, and Jefferson County conducted a random search of the school with their K-9 units looking for controlled substances. These searches are done on regular basis and are always unannounced. This relationship with local law enforcement is a great opportunity to help ensure that our schools are drug-free.
If you have any questions about the search, please do not hesitate to contact Building Principal Mike Lovenburg, District administrator Mark Elworthy, the Whitewater Police Department, or school safety director David Brokopp.
Likely sensing his first post was lacking, he posted again about ten hours later that evening:
To the Whitewater School Community,
Following a couple of Infinite Campus notifications today we would like to follow up and explain in more detail what took place today at both the High School and Middle School.
On a periodic basis, the district will coordinate with the Whitewater police department to bring a number of K-9 units which are trained to search for illegal substances on school grounds. School officials are made aware of these pending searches, but it is kept confidential until the time of the search for obvious reasons. When the officers arrive, the school is placed into a hold/lock. Students remain in locked classrooms, teachers take attendance and continue teaching.
The officers check lockers, vehicles and randomly selected classrooms during the search. When a classroom is searched, an administrator from the district enters the room and has the students leave and stand along the hallway wall outside of the room. Students are instructed to leave all personal items in the room when they leave. Once the room is empty, the dog and the handler enter and search the room. The dogs do not search people. Once the room has been checked, the students return to their room, and the search team continues their search.
In the event that a dog identifies an area or item, a more careful search is done of that item or area by a team of law enforcement and administrators. If something is identified that is not allowed by law or school policy, the student is removed from the room with the item and parents are contacted to continue the discussion. Each incident is investigated and handled on an individual basis.
As a district, we are incredibly grateful for our strong partnership with local law enforcement and thank them for their time and energy devoted to keeping our schools safe and drug-free.If there are additional questions about this process, please feel free to contact your building principal, the district administrator, Whitewater Police Department, or the district safety coordinator.
A few remarks:
➤ A “Great Opportunity.” It never was, and it never will be, a great opportunity to have to lock down a building, using law enforcement and police canines, to search for drugs.
At the most, it’s a grim necessity as an expression of social failure in communities that have to resort to law-enforcement solutions.
A great opportunity would be a lucrative business venture or perhaps the chance to win a vacation to a tropical place. Managing social pathology is never such – it’s an unfortunate matter, always.
We rely too little on medicine, social work, and therapy, and rely too much on enforcement actions.
Communities throughout this area have sought enforcement measures against drug use for decades, but the challenges remain (and if anything have grown worse among adults struggling with opioid addiction).
Those putting their hopes on a single enforcement action, or even series of actions, will prove disappointed. These are societal conditions far too vast to hope – or encourage others to expect – that enforcement alone will solve the matter.
➤ Ten Hours Later. It’s not a good sign that it took about ten hours for the district’s leadership both to grasp that the first Facebook message was lacking and to post a fuller explanation.
➤ Coordinator, Director. In one message one reads of the district’s safety director, in another the same person is district’s safety coordinator, but in all of them one would have thought he was, properly, a full-time school principal.
Rural America faces extraordinary challenges, those of health (needless to say) being not the least of them. Command solutions won’t get us through, no matter how much a few might hope, or claim, otherwise.