Privacy for teenagers is a fallacy. And if you disagree, you must have something to hide.
That’s the new reality in Oregon.
Well, not exactly new. Such fanatical, paranoid theorizing has existed as long as teenagers have. Only recently has such madness been reinforced by Oregon courts.
But we’ll get to that in a moment. For now, let’s don our rose-colored ski goggles and take a trip with the “Ghost of High School Injustices Past.”
If you stood up to your varsity football coach when he asked you to sign a pledge to not drink or do drugs during the season, it couldn’t possibly have been because you objected to promising not to do something he had no reason to assume you’d ever do in the first place. Oh no.
It’s because you were a junkie, undoubtedly sneaking off to your car to “ride the black pony” before that crucial third period health quiz.
Same thing goes for the contemporary practice of drug screening.
Most parents summarily reject the notion of idealism for its own sake among their teenage children.
However, this was not the case in Oakridge, where Ginelle Weber’s parents supported her in her genuinely good fight against Oakridge High School and its mandatory drug testing policy for all student athletes, which resulted in her being dropped from the volleyball team.
Last month, a Lane County judge ruled that Weber’s rights were violated when she was expelled from the sports program, but the ruling upheld the basic constitutionality of such random drug testing.
Not exactly a resounding victory for student rights. Especially when you take into consideration that Oakridge is but one of 13 high schools around Oregon currently utilizing such invasive and unjustifiable drug testing policies.
Luckily for us civil libertarians, the rest of the nation seems to be making more headway in the fight against anti-student rights fanaticism.
Recently, a Denver appeals court judge struck down an Oklahoma school’s policy of mandatory urine testing for all students involved in non-athletic extracurricular activities. In Texas, a high school attempting to implement similar policy for all students met with an identical fate.
What does this recent turn of events tell us? First of all, that the American Civil Liberties Union is working overtime to protect all students from being punished for a crime they aren’t even being tried for, and second, that at least in other states, the courts are listening.
More important is the fact that parents are continuing to wage this losing battle against their kids.
And it is a losing battle. Not just because the courts are, for the most part, siding with the students, but rather because there is simply no victory to be had from excluding kids from activities based on experimental or recreational drug use.
Take away a teenager’s ability to play volleyball, football or even to work on the school paper or yearbook, and what do you leave them with? A newly freed-up chunk of time to get high and stare at the television.
Take away a teenager’s ability to get accepted to college by preventing them from taking part in extracurricular activities and you’ve freed up the rest of his or her life to find new and more efficient ways to get high.
Take away a teenager’s hopes for the future, and you may as well get high yourself. You’ll need something to ease the pain of the perfect, drug-free world you’ve created.