'Little can be done with drug cases in schools'

By Annastashya Emmanuelle

JAKARTA (JP): Amid concern over drug addiction among high school students, the City Education Office said there was not much it could do to solve the problem.

Occasional briefings for school principals and the initiation of some drugs seminars have been the sum total of their efforts to date.

"We encourage schools to monitor their students more closely for narcotics-related problems and to conduct drug raids every now and then. Since the students' parents also have a role in determining their future, they too must be involved," Rojali Arsad, head of the youth counseling department at the city education office, told The Jakarta Post last weekend.

In its latest findings, the education office found more than 1,000 students across Jakarta took drugs last year.

Rojali admitted that the number could be larger due to unreported or undetected drugs cases in the schools at the time his office started to gather data on the subject.

From the invitation distributed by the office to all high schools in Jakarta, only 166 schools reported drug cases.

Some said they had yet to compile the data, while others failed to attend the briefing for unknown reasons, Rojali explained.

From over 1,000 high students who took drugs, 315 were expelled from school.

Ratnawati, the teacher-counselor at state high school SMU 3 in Setiabudi, South Jakarta, said the school had been battling against drugs for the last four years by conducting snap urine tests and raids.

During that period, they discovered only two cases, although they had been suspicious of around 150 students.

The students were not expelled from the school; however, their parents withdrew the children as they were embarrassed, Ratnawati said.

She acknowledged it was not easy to detect instances of drug abuse among students.

"We usually monitor students who seem to be constantly tired or have fallen asleep in class ... but without sufficient proof we can't do anything about it," she said, adding that parents and the students themselves ought to be more aware of the problems associated with drug abuse and should take precautionary action as well.

Separately, students and teachers at the privately run Pangudi Luhur high school for boys in South Jakarta, said they were fed up with their institution being labeled a "drugs base".

"Perhaps, because our boys are allowed to sport long hair, people think that they are ill-behaved," deputy principal Hendrikus Hermandi, told the Post.

He did not dismiss the possibility that some of his students might have experimented with drugs, but the school could not take any action unless the student had been proven guilty.

Thus far, Pangudi Luhur has found only one case, when a student was caught shooting-up heroin in an empty classroom.

He was beaten by the other students, and the parents withdrew their son from the school.

After that incident, the students launched a program dubbed "PL (Pangudi Luhur) Care" in an effort to combat drug abuse, which included a discussion on narcotics and urine testing.

Until now, they are still distributing stickers saying "Turn off drugs, turn on the future" at a road intersection near their school.

Bayu Kalyana, a student, said he was repelled by drug cases. "I think drug dealers should be sentenced to death."

Although cliched, teachers and students agree that one of the most effective ways to avoid drug abuse is to occupy students' time with positive activities.

"The least we can do is to provide the boys with various extracurricular activities, such as sports or arts, to occupy their free time. We hope they would be too tired afterwards to engage in other harmful activities," Hendrikus said.