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.