The Fairbanks Board of Education voted to have Memorial Hospital be its provider of drug testing for student athletes for the 2017-2018 school year.
In May, a representative from Sports Safe Testing Service, Inc. presented the company’s bid to be able to administer drug testing to Fairbanks High School’s athletes. However, Superintendent Bob Humble said, out of the two companies to submit bids, Memorial was willing to match whatever Sports Safe’s was offering. The catch is Sports Safe allowed a minimum of 10 students to be drug tested at a time, while Memorial offered a minimum of five at a time.
“We would much prefer to stick with someone local and someone who we’ve been dealing with on a regular basis,” Humble said.
Before this school year, student athletes would be drug tested at the beginning of a sports season. Students were also randomly drug tested up until the 2014-2015 school year. Random drug testing will continue for high school athletes for the 2017-2018 school year.
“We wanted to get back to the random testing and, in the process, we basically realized this is a better system,” he said. “For one thing, it’s going to be less expensive for us because we’re not going to have to test everyone all the time.”
With the new school year will come a policy change in the high school student handbook that focuses on student drug testing. From now on, five randomly selected student athletes will be drug tested once a week.
The policy will also include who’s eligible to be tested. Humble said, no matter what season a student is signed up to play sports in, they will still be put “into the pool” of students to be selected for drug testing. As an example, he said a person, who’s signed up for to participate in track or basketball for next season, will still be eligible to be drug tested.
“As long as you want to continue to be a student athlete, you’re going to be in the pool that could possibly be drug tested,” Humble said. “Once you’re in, you’re in until you tell us you want out.”
It was also discussed with the new athletic director, Larry Morris, how this would be presented to students. He said there will be informed consent letters that if “you sign it one time, it lasts your whole career.” He also talked about a three-strike for student-athletes that test positive and how they would follow a student throughout their high school career.
Morris also said, to better document if a student declines to participate in being submitted into a pool for drug testing, the school will “probably have to get something in place to make sure we have a record of that.”
In other news, Humble presented preliminary student test scores among middle school and showed students have been performing at or above state proficiency requirements in english, science and social studies. However, the scores were lower among math proficiency, which Humble said the program was “missing key content in eighth grade math.”
He said there are plans to “retool that content” for next year for what these math classes will provide. He said it’s good to now have two years of data on this subject so the board can compare results among different years.
Also at the meeting, the board discussed a meeting vice president Mark Lippencott and Humble had with an Ohio School Facilities Commission (OSFC) representative to discuss funding of school renovations. They were told it would be around $17.5 million to renovate the middle and high school but it wouldn’t add any more space to the building. He said the OSFC would be able to fund 15 percent of the renovations but the representative was quoted to say it would take “many, many years, if ever, before the district would see funding.”
Finally, the board is working with an anonymous couple who are willing to set up a donation service to needy students via the Adopt a Panther program. This would involve the program arranging funds to help pay for students who need extra money to afford lunch, with the possibility to extend to funding field trips or pay-to-play programs. People who wish to support the program may email adoptapanther@yahoo.com to make a donation or to inform them about a child or family in need.