The Tamaqua Area School District are discussing random drug testing for district employees.

The auxiliary committee approved the first reading of policies 351.1, 451.1 and 551.1 at last week’s workshop committee meeting. Adoption of the policies would permit the testing of district employees.

Superintendent Ray Kinder said the policies are for each level of district employment ­- professional staff, nonprofessional staff and administrative staff.

Dr. Stephen Toth said the district is working in conjunction with St. Luke’s Health Network.

“We did receive, if you will, a proposal from St Luke’s regarding how any panels of testing,” Kinder said. “Do you want a four panel; do you want a 10-panel? Do you want it assessed by a lab, or is it going to be an instant result? A lot of those type of things will come into the effect of cost.”

Kinder noted the sampling would be random.

“Again, this isn’t part of the policy, but just to get a feel what some people are thinking - we looked at it initially for 10 employees a month - that’s 120 a year. Of our full-time staff, that’s probably about a little more than a third,” said Kinder.

“Depending on if we use that as a number, testing would run anywhere from just under $5,000 a year for the four-panel instant test, compared to the 11-panel test that gets sent away - that cost would be somewhere around $9-10,000.”

Kinder said no policy or procedure was in place for employee drug testing. But it’s a different story for some district students.

“We have drug tested our students as a part of our athletics policy and our activity policy, so we have done that,” said Kinder. “But we handled that ourselves, we do the actual administration of the testing. This is something that we would be using an outside vendor for.”

Kinder said some students who participate in extracurricular activities at the secondary level are randomly selected by software each month to get tested.

“This was a talking point years ago, when we were talking about the drug problem in any school,” said board President Larry Wittig.

“The thing is, well if we’re subjecting all of the kids to random drug tests, should we do the same thing for the employees? It was always a contractual thing that we had to get by. … It gives the administration, board and public a sense of fairness - that everyone is going to be subject to the same rule sand kind of scrutiny that would be fair for everybody.”

Kinder noted more specifics will be released in the future.

“We’ll have to look at the pool of people we want it to be. Do we want it to be our full-time employees? Do we want it to be only our paid employees? Do we want it to be all of our coaches and all of our advisers and all of our volunteers who are in our booster club,” Kinder asked the board.

“We’ll have to get through that again and narrow it down. There might be some small things we have to adjust during our first reading and second reading. We’ll point those out to you next month.”