Pubdate: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 Source: Cartersville Daily Tribune,The (GA) Copyright: 2009 The Cartersville Daily Tribune Contact: http://www.daily-tribune.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1369 Author: Jon Gargis, Staff Writer BARTOW SCHOOLS' NEW HIRES TO BE TESTED FOR DRUGS Future applicants for jobs with the Bartow County School System will soon have to pass a drug test before they can be hired. School board members at their monthly business session Monday approved the final reading of Board Policy GAMA-B, which requires applicants to submit to pre-employment, post-offer drug tests. Those to be tested under the policy include new applicants and current employees who apply for a vacancy in the district, and would apply to all professional and non-professional, regular full-time and regular part-time positions, including summer school teachers and paid non-teacher coach/adviser positions. The tests would be have to be taken within a 48-hour window that would begin the day after a hire or promotion is approved by school board members. School board members themselves also will be tested as part of a provision they agreed to add to the policy. "All the [board] members say, 'We're ready. We want to demonstrate that it's a plan we like and we support,'" Superintendent John Harper said. Harper said the district is putting together a request for bids for drug tests, which will be paid for by the job applicants. He said the request should go out this week. Board members also approved a measure that will see the district submit to the state a plan that will outline how it will spend more than more than $3.9 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds from the federal government. "In order for us to obtain our funding, we have to submit a plan that shows what are the projected job savings, as well as in what areas do we plan on reflecting the expenditure of these funds," said Todd Hooper, the district's chief financial officer. Hooper said the funds, which the district will receive in September and October, will save about 66 jobs. "The guidelines we got with that were we were going to use that for positions that possibly would have been eliminated with the reduction of funds that came from the state, and we've done that," Harper said. "Essentially, what everybody's hoping for is the economy will rebound in these two years, the funds will be back available from the state, and the ARRA funds that are there after two years will no longer be needed -- that the state will have come back financially and those positions will remain." Board member Matt Shultz was the sole dissenting vote on the ARRA spending plan, voicing his objection to accepting the White House's stimulus funds. He said that while the money may be used to save jobs, some in the government will use the district's spending plan to count the saved jobs as created jobs. He said such funding also creates some uncertainty when developing future budgets as it is unknown if those affected positions will be able to be funded in coming years. "I feel like we're kind of being used, to some extent, as political pawns here for an objective being pushed down from the White House, because that's where this money is coming from," Shultz said. "I have a real problem with that ... [because] at the end of the day, we may never have lost these jobs anyway. "This money doesn't come without strings. The string is they're using this information to serve their own political purpose. Otherwise, why report it?" "What we know, being here a couple months later, the $3.9 million was not additional money for us to employ additional people to meet objectives," Hooper said, "but it's really replacing funding that the state of Georgia decided to actually pull out of [Quality Basic Education] funding, so really all we've done at this point is we've probably saved jobs instead of actually creating additional jobs, which I think probably one of the original intents [of the funding] was to say, 'Look how many jobs we've created.'" - --- MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr