Where is Joe Price when you need him?
Joe was a Haines kid with a sharp mind and enough backbone to challenge the Haines Borough’s school administration – and win.
The issue was a proposal from then principal Gary Matthews to use a breathalyzer at high school dances to see if students might be nipping at a flask of firewater. Joe thought that wasn’t a good thing to do.
So he wrote an editorial in the student newspaper – there was such a thing at one time and Joe was editor of it – making his arguments, including questioning how a decision to use a breathalyzer would be made and if use of the device was really necessary.
If memory serves, Joe also said the use of the device would carry the presumption of guilt and would erode trust between students and the administration.
A crowd of students turned out at the school board meeting to testify and their testimony swayed the school board, who voted down the principal’s proposal.
Forty years later and just last month, the Haines Borough School Board voted to spend $5,000 to put “vape detectors” in the school lavatories.
The purpose of the detectors is not clear. School officials say it’s not to catch and punish students who vape but to “deter” vaping. Just as with drinking at dances 40 years ago, school officials don’t know if students are vaping, but there’s a “general understanding” that they do.
A person needn’t have a mind as sharp as Joe Price’s to poke holes in the logic here, but as Joe is no longer around, allow me:
If school officials don’t know they have a problem, why spend $5,000 on it?
What message does vape detectors send to students, other than “we don’t trust you and you are being watched”?
Are there other friendlier and less expensive approaches to deter vaping, such as educating students to vaping’s dangerous effects?
Who, besides vaping students, is hurt if a kid is sneaking a vape in a bathroom stall?
Might the district’s solution in this case be extreme, insulting and expensive compared to the known scale and severity of the problem?
Five grand may not be much money for the school board, but it could go a long way toward alternative approaches. Such as providing another school activity, or some counseling for kids caught up in addiction, or an assembly program featuring a credible adult lecturer who has grappled with a vaping or smoking habit and kicked it.
This town’s Presbyterian sensibility is to go after unhealthy behaviors like renters go after cockroaches – to find them and stamp them out.
Anyone familiar with unhealthy behaviors knows such methods don’t work. What works is providing information, goodwill, support and compassion to people who are weak in the face of bad choices, and to make them strong.
Joe Price was battling the school administration not long after Ronald Reagan announced his administration’s War on Drugs and zero tolerance drug policies. Reagan’s war, of course, is over. It didn’t work. Prohibition and penalties rarely do.
Joe Price probably understood that 40 years ago. He was a smart kid. We could use the likes of him in the school’s halls today, challenging bad ideas and printing a newspaper representing our young adults.