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We don't want to get in a prolonged cat fight on the editorial page of this paper but in his letter last week, school board member Robert Eastham made some charges which we have to answer.
He maintained that the drug and alcohol policy currently in effect in the county's public schools was put in place over the ''stubborn opposition” of this newspaper. That is not the case.
We had a quarrel with Eastham's unsuccessful attempt to give drugs much greater emphasis than alcohol. Alcohol is a drug and it's by far the drug most abused by young people, not only in Rappahannock but in the state and throughout the nation.
We admit to being vigorously opposed as well to the original implementation of the policy. It specifies that students SUSPECTED of a violation be suspended pending school board action. When the drug and alcohol policy was adopted two years ago. the school board had another policy of not holding special meetings for discipline cases. In effect, that meant that a student SUSPECTED of a violation could wait as long as a month before getting a due process hearing. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the school board would decide in some instances that no violation had occurred but that decision would have come too late for the student who had already missed precious days of classes.
To ensure fair and impartial treatment, we felt that the board should drop its refusal to hold special sessions for discipline cases related to drug and alcohol policy enforcement. That position must have had some merit because after conferring with legal counsel, the school board opted to create a special discipline committee to deal with drug and alcohol problems as they arose. We also find fault with Eastham s claim that the school board chairman
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