The American Civil Liberties Union is expected to deliver a letter to Gov. Linda Lingle today demanding the state halt plans to randomly drug-test public school teachers and employees.

After a series of six meetings with hundreds of educators around the state — the last of which was held last night at Leeward Community College — the ACLU said it has gathered a list of more than 150 teachers who are willing to participate in a legal challenge of a new contract that allows random drug testing of Hawai'i public school employees.

"We've heard a wide range of reasons why teachers oppose the testing. Teachers are quite angry, upset and insulted by the governor's drug-testing proposal," said Graham Boyd, director of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project.

The ACLU said it will hold a press conference after delivering the letter to the governor at 11:30 this morning at the state Capitol.

"In addition to being demonstrably ineffective and exceedingly costly, random drug testing violates Hawai'i educators' constitutional right to privacy," the ACLU said yesterday in a news release.

The state Department of Education and the teachers union, the Hawai'i State Teachers Association, are scheduled to hold talks this month to establish guidelines for a random drug-testing program, said Greg Knudsen, spokesman for the Department of Education.

The governor's office and the Hawai'i State Teachers Association did not immediately return phone calls for comment.

Hawai'i's approximately 13,500 public school teachers ratified a two-year contract on May 2. The union forwarded the contract to the membership without its endorsement, but 61 percent of union members still voted to ratify the contract.

The contract also included a 4 percent pay raise in each year, plus "step" increases — a move up on the salary ladder — for many teachers.

The insertion of the random drug-testing provision into the contract was suggested by the governor just a week before contract negotiations were completed, union negotiators said.

Before that, negotiations had centered around a suspicion-based program.

The state said it would not agree to a contract that did not include random testing.

"There were literally months of negotiations about the probable-cause drug-testing provision and that makes sense to literally all of the teachers we've talked to," Boyd said.

"What teachers are upset about is the casting a dragnet of suspicion on every teacher," he said.

Boyd said he suspects that the list of teachers willing to participate in a legal challenge will continue to grow.

Reach Loren Moreno at lmoreno@honoluluadvertiser.com.