random drug testing for teachers?

hey everyone i am trying to become a social science teacher in a public school. i know i will get drug tested pre employment and i have heard that when you need to renew your license you will get finger printed and drug tested again as if you were getting hired. i know this may vary but generally do public school teacher get randomly tested? i would imagine this would be rare because it costs so much money and why would they risk loosing a teacher in the middle of the year?. do they merley threaten you with random testing and then not follow through with it? the county i am interested in says it drug tests for routine physical exams- how likley is it i would get one of these out of the blue? do you think its possibile to get an annual drug test? the county also says it randomly drug tests school employees in "high risk" positions. i am assuming these are employees like bus drivers, maintanence, janitors etc... all in all i want as many opinions as possibile. please feel free to share your stories or stories of people you know/ anything that would be helpful...thanks

I have a friend that recently got a teaching job in the south, and after cleaning out, he found out they don't even require a test to get a job there. I don't know how this works from school to school, or county to county, let alone state to state, but it seems they are more relaxed the more southern and rural you get.

yeah I live in the south and i know when i was in high school, they didn't drug test the teachers. They drug tested the students though which was bullshit. I don't see why they didn't get tested while we did but anyway there was one teacher that actually had a certain type of laboratory in her house making a type of drug that pretty much destroys you but i won't mention it since the forum has that policy about other drugs, but yeah if she can do hard drugs and not get caught by the school then im sure you'll be able to get away with marijuana. I graduated in 05 so im pretty sure they still dont drug test since that was only like 3 years ago.

I can't answer your question because I don't know any teachers, or individuals that have interviewed for teaching positions but in my OPINION education is too important to not drug test teachers. I'm kind of a hypocrite for thinking that though.

Hey, Ashbrown. I moved your question to the Drug Testing sub-forum since it deals with that subject.

I am a former teacher here in Texas. It's been a long time since I taught school (well over 20 years) here, but they randomly drug-tested even back then. It was a fairly rare occurrence, but they did. In Texas they still do. Nowadays they do pre-employment drug screening along with the criminal background checks, and then they routinely random-test small groups of teachers periodically just to keep them honest. The bottom line is that if you're looking at being a public school teacher, you're likely to face drug testing. It's just a fact of life, I'm afraid.

From what I've read, a huge majority of jobs that professional, degreed people get, whether it's for the government, private sector (corporate), or in education, involve drug testing. In education it's about minimizing liability and ensuring the safety of children and not doing anything to--eek, God forbid!!--make parents harder to deal with. In government and private sector jobs, it's seen as a way of ensuring productivity and minimizing liability like might be involved if, say, somebody were stoned in a big way and had a terrible accident that would require an insurance or workman's comp payout. This is the same reason why there's nearly always drug testing when there's a workplace accident when workman's comp might have to step up and foot the bill. If they can blame that accident on "drugs" and fire the employee who used them instead of paying out the workman's comp claim, then that's what they prefer to do.