Student breathalyzers anger Smyrna parents

Tina Vass couldn’t believe it when her son told her a breathalyzer test was being administered to every student walking into the Smyrna High School homecoming dance.

Like many parents, it was the first she had heard of the practice of giving mandatory alcohol tests before homecoming festivities and prom.

“I didn’t know about it until after the fact,” said Vass, who has lived in Smyrna for 10 years. “It’s not the fact that they did it that makes me angry. It’s the fact that they didn’t notify the parents.”

That was the complaint by a number of parents contacted by The News Journal. While each said they were annoyed by the test being administered and that it even bordered on infringing on their rights, the most angst came from the school district’s lack of communication.

“Anything the school does to a kid should first be communicated to the parent,” said Thelma Hendrix, who has two children in ninth grade. “They just told my kids to blow into the breathalyzer and they did. They didn’t even explain to them why they were doing it.”

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Smyrna School Superintendent Deborah Wicks defended the right for the district to continue the long-standing practice that was started in 1994 in response to a Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) initiative, saying it continues to be a way to keep the students safe.

“We believe it has saved lives,” said Wicks, who has been in the district since the tests were started. “It’s been a good practice, and we’ll continue to do it for the public good.”

Wicks acknowledged the complaints from parents who didn’t know about the practice. She said the district could certainly do a better job of getting the word out that a breathalyzer will be given before any student is admitted to homecoming and prom festivities.

The superintendent said the district is looking into different ways to alert parents. Among those are printing an alert on the tickets themselves, putting a notice on the discipline contract each student must sign at the beginning of the school year and printing a notice in the Messenger newsletter that is distributed three times a year.

“We can certainly do a better job of letting parents know and we will look into that in the future,” she said.

Wicks said even if a student did blow positive on the test, the school would simply call the parents to come to the school. She said they would not be arrested. While Laurence Hinds believes he would definitely be called if his son tested positive, he said that wouldn’t be the end of it.

With a law enforcement background, Hinds said that if there was a positive on the test, even if it was a false positive, the School Resource Officer administering the test would have no other choice than to arrest the student or he would lose his certification.

From there, Hinds said the student would be expelled from school because of the zero tolerance policy regarding alcohol and drugs. In the end, he said it will certainly cost the student, but it also would cost the parents a “pretty penny” in court and legal fees.

‘It’s not a bad idea on some levels to administer the breathalyzer,” said Hinds, who could not find anything in the school’s student handbook in regards to the test. “My issue, like many other parents, is that I had no idea this was happening. It needs to be communicated. My kid should learn from me if he is going to have a breathalyzer, not at school by an SRO.”

In the end, many parents believe, as parent Demetrius Todd does, that the school could have gone about this differently, including making it an educational piece talked about in class where the practice is laid out, the consequences talked about and a notice sent home to parents that it is happening.

“Students and parents need to be aware of this up front,” Todd said. “The explanation can’t be that we have always done it this way. Just because you have always done it this way doesn’t mean it is right.”

A spokesperson for the Delaware Department of Education said that there is no policy concerning mandatory breathalyzer tests before school functions that occur on school grounds and that any practice doing so would come from individual school districts.

Several school districts in central Delaware said that no such practice existed at their respective schools.

Reach Jerry Smith at jsmith17@delawareonline.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JerrySmithTNJ.