School paper digs into student drug problem (Some staff shocked when they find there is one)

[Are_grits_groceries]

St. Petersburg, Florida - Journalism students at Lakewood High School in St. Petersburg don't shy away from investigating controversial topics. "We wanted to do something to get people's attention," said Lakewood senior and Spartan News Network, Editor-in-Chief Parker Fox.

The cover story of the SNN (name of the school paper), December issue is on student drug use.

More Info: The survey and other articles and videos from the Spartan News Network: http://snntoday.snn.pcsb.org/

The newspaper staff interviewed students, wrote personal accounts and surveyed the student body about drug use. The 176 students in the survey reveled that more than half had used illegal drugs and 46 percent said students use drugs on campus.

"The results you get from this survey are results you would get from every high school," said journalism teacher Kathleen Tobin.

But the numbers surprised school resource officer Lerric Boyd, who says he and staff pay close attention to monitor campus on foot and with cameras. "If the numbers are true, then the kids are being secretive."

The big surprise for Fox was not the number, it was the reason students may be using drugs. "We came into this thinking this was peer pressure," said Fox. But after reading one student's account of his own experimentation with drugs, he came to another conclusion. "It's stress from school the pressures of life."
http://www.wtsp.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=120286&catid=8

The powers that be hate to find a drug problem because then they have to do something about it. In one school where I taught, the principal had drug dogs brought in to check the freshman lockers. Afterwards, she came on the intercom and just bubbled over as she said that nothing was found.
My students howled. They told me that they didn't know what happened, but those dogs needed to be returned as defective.
I said that they must have been trained to detect homework.

In another school, a friend of mine and I smelled marijuana coming from a student bathroom. We checked and nobody was in there. It was so strong, we stayed for a few minutes to get high. When he told the principal, he said it was just toilet paper burning. I asked him what company he ordered it from because I wanted some.

[surrealAmerican]

1. Good for them (the student reporters, that is).

Many schools make it hard for students to report anything that casts the school in a bad light. This is great experience for an aspiring journalist.