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Sort of.
"But I will disagree — to my grave — that that's the best we can do for kids," said the director of Compass Mark, an organization that provides substance abuse education, prevention and intervention programs to almost all of the county's public and private school systems.
Compass Mark formerly was known as the Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
"We're talking educational institutions here," he said. "If the best thing they can do is give kids a feeble excuse like that, then we are underselling our educational system. We don't give them the same excuse for not laughing at racist jokes. We don't give them the same excuse for not bullying, for not carrying a weapon to school.
"If we are trying to prepare kids for life we can do much better.
That's why he does not support random, mandatory drug testing.
"The main problem is that random drug testing ends up being the small thing that gets all of us off the hook for not having to do the hard things," he said. "We can say, 'Hey, we did our job,' and then we don't have to do the difficult things, like building life skills."
Bender does believe drug testing has a place in confirming suspected use.
"If a kid is falling asleep in class, is displaying very erratic behavior, then I would say drop a drug test on them right away," he said. "I don't want to totally rule out the potentially good aspects of using a test to confirm suspected, observable use."
The tests, Bender said, do not detect some of the more prevalent substance abuse problems.
"Schools are not ID'ing binge drinkers. They're not ID'ing the club drug user, the coke user, the prescription drug user," he said. "What they're doing is ID'ing a small percent of kids who are smoking lots of weed."
While information on how to beat the tests is readily available, Bender said, most don't need it.
"I've talked to kids who've told me they partied on a Friday and Saturday," Bender said. "They were drinking their brains out, maybe doing a few club drugs, snorting a little coke. Monday they went to school, their name came up to be tested, and they were scared to death. But when they were tested, the results came up zilch, zip.
"The tests can't detect weekend alcohol use," Bender said. "Coke, depending on how much you do, is out of the system in 24 to 48 hours. Club drugs are not tested for at all.
"Well, guess how long it took for that word to get around."
Bender believes random drug testing "is another example of teaching to a test. If you know what they're asking, you can pass."
The move toward random drug testing, Bender said, is indicative of two societal shifts.
The first, in Bender's view, is "the change from where the school administration used to have complete control and now it doesn't. Now, some parents tend to fight everything. Schools are not the authoritarian institutions they once were."
The second, and more disturbing shift, Bender said, is "our inability as people in this nation to discuss difficult issues sanely. If you have a problem with the next-door neighbor, we would much rather call the police or an attorney rather than just walk over there and try to talk things through."
This inability to communicate begins at school.
"You would expect that an educational system would be the last bastion of hope to teach people how to communicate with each other," Bender said. "But when we rely on random drug testing, we remove the need for kids to take responsibility for themselves, for their friends and for the school environment. And we allow the adults in that school to abdicate that responsibility as well.
"The real role of education is to place expectations that kids will develop appropriate communication skills, from kid to kid, from kid to adult. We have to do the hard work to make that communication a reality. We need to teach communication skills, we need to teach them how to be resilient, we need to teach them decision-making skills. And yes, it is hard work, but it's necessary."
Drug and alcohol education for students is mandatory in Pennsylvania from kindergarten through the 12th grade, Bender said.
"But it's one of those unfunded mandates," he said, "and very few schools actually do it, particularly where it is needed the most — from middle school on up. There's just too much pressure to do everything else."
Bender said schools often talk a good game, but can't follow through.
When testing is initiated, "a school will say, 'This will be just one component of a broad-based education program,' but that doesn't happen," Bender said. "The problem is the federal government has made free money available for drug testing. So it's easy to get that money, but they haven't made it easy to get free money for the educational stuff. As a result, drug testing stays and the other stuff gets cut."
Hempfield School District superintendent Brenda Becker said she understands Bender's concern about cutbacks, recognizing that districts everywhere are feeling budget pressures.
However, she said, reductions in the curriculum "have not happened in our case. We are committed to preserving the educational component in our district."
Bender has seen successful initiatives aimed at encouraging children to attend school and keep them from using drugs and alcohol.
Mentoring programs in the School District of Lancaster have helped increase attendance.
Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology has a mandatory course for freshmen called "Personal Resiliency."
"Wherever this program has been implemented," Bender said, "for freshmen classes, the pre- and post-test data shows a conclusive reduction in binge drinking."
Students who have taken that course are now mentoring ninth- and 10th-graders at McCaskey.
"People think I'm naïve to believe we can develop these types of skills in kids," Bender said. "But I've seen it happen. And I've seen it happen with kids you would have never thought possible. Regardless of how difficult it is, developing skills is what makes the difference.
"There are risks involved in that. But we certainly can't harm-proof our kids with some simple test."
