The Drug Foundation is urging schools to support students caught using drugs and alcohol rather than punishing them, Radio New Zealand reports.
Drug Foundation executive director Ross Bell said programmes which supported young people and helped them face up to their actions were more effective than expelling them.
The number of students disciplined for smoking and alcohol or drug use had been dropping - something Bell partly attributed to increasing numbers of schools helping students deal with their problem. However, others were letting the side down, he said.
“There are still those schools that are holding out. That have this mentality that ‘we're tough, we have zero tolerance, you're going to be out of here, we're not going to tolerate that in our school’.
“And it's those schools that are taking that tough approach that aren't doing the best by those students.”
Such schools were worried about their reputation, Bell said.
But expelling a student was the easy option, and it was a lot harder to keep them in school on a programme which got them to face up to what they had done and to mend their ways, he said.
