
Books & Papers
What’s Your Color? Restarting a Random Drug Screening Program
Tecora Davis and John Fedor, Jr.
When Covid-19 shut down District 20's 'Color Code' random drug-screening programme, Tecora Davis and John Fedor used Working Dialogue to redesign it from the ground up — and bring it safely back online under pandemic rules.
Published in The World Needs Dialogue! Four: Putting Dialogue to Work (2022), this paper documents how the District 20 Probation and Parole District in Virginia used Working Dialogue to redesign and relaunch its suspended random drug screening programme under Covid-19 restrictions. When the governor declared a state of emergency in March 2020, the Color Code programme was halted; only court-ordered or public-safety-driven screenings continued, leaving a significant gap in supervision at precisely the moment when opiate and methamphetamine use was escalating across the district. By February 2021, staff faced the challenge of bringing the programme back online while navigating social distancing mandates and the physical constraints of a cramped office layout. Davis and Fedor convened a Working Dialogue process to draw staff knowledge into the redesign, producing a flexible Implementation Memorandum that outlined new procedures capable of adapting as conditions changed. The paper demonstrates how dialogue, applied to an operational and logistical problem rather than a philosophical one, can generate practical solutions that carry staff ownership from the outset.
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