Newsbrief:
Dallas
Schools
Using
Trace
Scanner
for
Drug
Detection
1/7/05
Trace scanners, devices which pick up microscopic traces of substances, are typically found in airports, where they search for explosives, and in prisons, where they are used to detect traces of illegal drugs on visitors (who are then banned from visiting), but they have also found a home in the Dallas Independent School District, which has become the nation's first to use them to find drugs and drug users in its classrooms and hallways. After testing the device last year, the school district has now contracted with Trace Detection Services, a Louisiana firm, to have all 47 of its middle and high schools tested this year, the Dallas Morning News reported. Results from testing in selected schools in the last few years, which included traces of heroin-laced pot in one school and a "love nest" in another where students snorted cocaine, provoked the district to expand the program, said spokesman Danny Claxton. "They weren't the results we were looking for," he said. The testing already done has aroused concerns among teachers at at least one district high school, suburban Red Oak. There, Trace Detection Services examined the IDs and lockers of all 1,500 students, a move teachers called disruptive and intrusive. And the district didn't come up with much for its efforts, conceded district police force (!?) head Scott Lindsay. Before the sweep, officials suspected the school was awash in cocaine, he told the Morning News, but the scans turned up mostly marijuana, and on only five percent of the students. "It worked and it turned out to be something of a relief," he said. School officials and Trace Detection alike portrayed the program as less of a law enforcement tool and more of a way to improve drug prevention and education. As Trace president Gary Pfeltz noted, "Under the law, schools need only reasonable suspicion to search a student, and this one way they can do it," he said. "But we found there is more interest in this for education. That also happens to be where the federal funds are." Pfeltz told the Morning News his was a two-man start-up company that is looking for a market. The Dallas gig, worth just under $50,000, is his first big contract. But with school administrators turning a deaf ear to the Orwellian overtones of such devices, his is probably a business to invest in.
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