Thefts of Drugs Prompt Schools To Tighten Up

By Lisa Fine

After returning to school from a long weekend earlier this year, Tim Jarboe entered the nurse's office at the Georgia middle school where he is the principal to do the weekly medicine count. He gasped when he saw the medicine cart with its lock cut off and drawers of pills pried open.

"Oh, no," Mr. Jarboe remembers thinking. "Not again."

In the second such incident since September, the medication bottles of 16 students were missing from Coile Middle School in Athens, Ga. That meant that more than 430 pills of Ritalin and Adderall, two stimulants commonly used to treat students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, were...