MCS CONSIDERS DRUG TESTS FOR STUDENTS IN SOME ACTIVITIES

Students who participate in extracurricular activities or drive to school
would be subject to random, unannounced drug testing in a policy the
Madison Consolidated Schools board will consider at its next meeting. The
policy would go into effect Jan. 1, 2006.

The two groups were singled out because the state Supreme Court has upheld
a school's right to check those two groups for drugs in a court case from
the Rushville school system, Superintendent Tom Patterson told the school
board this week. The board could vote on the policy at its next meeting,
which will be at 7 p.m. Dec. 13.

The policy would continue to allow school officials to require a drug test
whenever they have suspicion of drug use.

Copies of the policy are available from Pam Smith, secretary in the
superintendent's office. School board president Linda Darnell said that
people who have opinions about the proposed policy should share them with
Patterson before the next school board meeting. Patterson said he can make
corrections and additions to the policy if necessary before it goes back
before the board.

School nurses want policy on lice changed

Absenteeism due to head lice is so high it is a problem, and children who
have the blood-sucking bugs in their hair are victimized by the Madison
Consolidated Schools policy for dealing with lice and lice eggs, or nits,
the school system's head nurse told the school board this week.

The nurses, backed by a Madison pediatrician, want the policy changed,
nurse Terry Kapfhammer said.

The policy is unfair because it requires children who have head lice to be
sent home immediately and to not return until they pass an inspection by
the Health Department, a school nurse, or a designated person in their
school. Yet, she said, no such policy covers coughs, colds or other things
children can catch from each other, she said.

Some parents are unable to get their children to school on their own when
they are ready to be inspected, so they keep the children at home for what
are logged as unexcused absences, Kapfhammer said. If enough unexcused
absences pile up, Child Protective Services can be called in, she said.
Every time a child gets lice again, the absences are longer, Kapfhammer
said. Sometimes, she said, children are kept home longer than necessary
because they or their family are embarrassed.

Everyone knows who has lice, and panic sets in among parents and the school
staff, Kapfhammer said. She said the nurses try to educate parents about
lice, but more education is needed. Lice can be spread only by contact,
Kapfhammer said, so being in the same room with a child who has lice does
not mean that they will spread from head to head, she said. One control
measure is to not have children work so closely together that their hair
touches, she said. Another is to have cubbies or another way to store
winter coats, rather than pile them together in a corner because lice can
get shaken from one coat onto another, Kapfhammer said. Spreading lice this
way isn't very common, though, she said, because lice must be on a person
in order to live.

Children who have lice suffer from low self-esteem because of embarrassment
at being singled out, Kapfhammer said. "The social effect is horrible,"
Kapfhammer said.

The current policy puts the responsibility for controlling lice on the
schools, not on the homes, she said.

And, Kapfhammer said, there is no getting rid of lice completely, so the
best that can be done is control them as much as possible.

Mass screenings of schoolchildren are not an effective way to find lice,
and no such screening is ever used for other things that children can catch
from each other, she said.

"We don't screen an entire class when a kid comes down with strep throat,"
she said.

"We have allowed fear to take over our sense of reason," Kapfhammer said of
the school and parent reactions to outbreaks of lice. There's no similar
reaction when a child has ringworm or other condition that is "much more
contagious" than lice, she said.

The current policy allows a school to notify parents of lice outbreaks, but
Kapfhammer said such notices start "gossip wheel" at the school.

The board took no action on the policy.

Saturday evening graduation possible

Madison is probably going to change graduation next spring to the Saturday
of Memorial Day weekend, a departure from the traditional Sunday afternoon
ceremony, but the time is in question.

A committee at the high school recommended moving graduation to Saturday,
but did not specify a time, member Kim Deffenbaugh said. But the time that
was in the proposal sent to the school board, 4 p.m., is only two and a
half hours after the start of Hanover College's graduation.

Parents Rick and Linda La Cour asked the board to change the time because
they don't think they will have time to get from their son's graduation at
Hanover to their daughter's graduation at Madison Consolidated High School.

When they started looking into the time conflict, the La Cours said, they
learned from Hanover officials that eight students from Madison will be
graduating from the college, so other families could be facing the same
time crunch. Deffenbaugh said the committee did not check for possible
conflicts with Hanover and other Indiana colleges.

The board consensus was to say that for now, it will be at either 4:30 or 6
p.m., and vote on the time after hearing from the public before the next
board meeting Dec. 13.