FARMINGTON – Last week, a Mount Blue High School student was expelled after he admitted he brought marijuana to school and gave it to a friend. He is the second one expelled for pot-related activity this academic year.

“We are very concerned about it,” Principal Greg Potter admitted Wednesday. “Incidents where students are getting caught with marijuana are on the rise. And it’s a real cancer.”

Twenty of the school’s approximately 1,000 students have been suspended for marijuana use, possession or transfer or possessing paraphernalia this school year, he said.

Eleven percent of freshmen and 22 percent of seniors in Franklin County said they had used marijuana more than 40 times in their lifetime, according to the Maine Office of Substance Abuse’s 2002 Maine Youth Drug and Alcohol Use Survey.

“We fight it, and we do everything in our power to keep it out of our school,” said Potter, who heads the largest high school in the county.

When students are expelled because of marijuana, they are required to attend substance abuse counseling before the school board considers their readmission.

And, the school has begun working with Community Concepts for a social worker to meet with expelled or suspended students to do case management, and to link them to counseling or other resources.

Since having a Breathalyzer on hand for suspicious students at school dances, Potter said there hasn’t been one incident of a student being caught drinking. “It’s very effective,” he said.

Catching kids with pot isn’t as easy. The student expelled last week was busted after a note about the transfer of the weed was found by a staff member.

The district’s board last year approved the use of a canine search dog in the school to sniff for drugs, but Potter said it’s a controversial way to route out drugs, and right now, he doesn’t plan to use it.

Instead, staff follows up on “any reasonable suspicion” of marijuana use and are “very aggressive” in doing so, Potter said. “We follow it up to the end.”

Meanwhile, the county’s smallest high school, Rangeley Lakes Regional with fewer than 100 students, hasn’t had an expulsion or suspension because of marijuana, Superintendent Ken Coville said. That doesn’t mean students don’t use the substance, he said, it just means they don’t use it in school. Forty-two percent of Rangeley seniors and juniors surveyed in 2002 said they used marijuana before they entered high school.

“It continues to be a trend to use outside of school,” he said.

All of Rangeley’s K-12 students attend school under the same roof, and it’s not uncommon for seniors to pass by kindergarten students in the halls. Coville thinks that and the high community involvement at the school is why more students aren’t using pot on campus.

Jay Superintendent Robert Wall said none of the approximately 320 students at the high school there have been suspended or expelled because of marijuana this year.

Wall said the school offers programs that teach awareness about the negative effects of marijuana use, and resources are in place to teach students “ways to operate as a person without using substances to cope with problems.”

Coville said perhaps the reason schools in districts that cover a smaller area have less drug problems at school is because students live closer together, mostly in the same town, and have more opportunities to connect.

SAD 9 covers nine towns. School is the place where students socialize.

sdepoy@sunjournal.com

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