High school for sobriety proposed
County education officials looking to help students learn and recover
“Once kids go to rehab and get sober, we put them right back in the same environment . ... It’s not a productive situation.” Jimmy Wynn, Harris County Department of Education
Harris County students struggling with substance abuse and addiction soon could have a high school to address their specific needs, part of a nascent trend toward viewing drug abuse by teenagers and others as something that requires treatment rather than punishment.
The Harris County Department of Education voted 4-0 this week to create a “recovery high school” in one of the department’s facilities in north Houston and provide $950,000 to help launch it. Plans call for the school to open in September with about 30 students. It would be the first traditional public school in the region — and the third in Texas — to specifically target students accused of substance abuse.
Currently, only two schools educate such students in the Houston area, according to the Association of Recovery Schools. Both charge tuition, although one is private and
the other is a private-charter hybrid.
However, the proposed school could be upended by efforts in the Legislature to do away with the Harris County agency. GOP lawmakers have filed bills questioning the agency’s efficacy and proposing its elimination.
At least 11,068 students within Region 4’s 50 school districts, including Harris County’s 22 districts, were disciplined for drugor alcohol-related issues in the 2015-2016 school year, according to Texas Education Agency data. Setting for sobriety
Jimmy Wynn, special assistant to the superintendent of the Harris County agency, said those statistics prompted department leaders to act. The school could provide a setting for students to maintain sobriety.
“Once kids go to rehab and get sober, we put them right back in the same environment where they were using before, with the same folks,” Wynn said of the current state of affairs. “It’s not a productive situation. The likelihood that they slip back into those habits is very strong.”
The proposal comes as the 128-year-old agency tries to fend off attacks from conservative lawmakers in Austin. Some have questioned the merits of the department, complaining that it duplicates services provided by other education offices and has a bloated bureaucracy. Backers note that about one-third of the department’s tax revenue is spent hiring special education workers, who provide 53 percent of all special education therapies across Harris County.
This week, a Senate committee approved a bill that would authorize a “sunset review” of the department, which would study the services provided by the department and how best to eliminate it, if necessary. Similar bills have targeted Dallas County Public Schools, the only other countywide department of education in the state.
Wynn said that while he hopes legislators will see the work that the Harris County agency does with children in its HeadStart programs and special education therapies, the recovery school was not proposed as a way to sway lawmakers.
“It’s to solve a problem and meet a challenge,” Wynn said. “One would hope people would step back and see, ‘Wow, these folks are really getting it done, showing how to help public school kids,’ which is what we exist to do.”
Ultimately, agency Superintendent James Colbert Jr. has said he would like the agency to operate as many as four recovery schools in the Houston area, one for each quadrant of Harris County. Growing trend
The rise of recovery schools is a relatively recent phenomenon, according to recovery schools expert Andy Finch, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University. There are only 39 in operation across the country, but Finch said he has learned of five or six others that could open this fall.
The reasons for the increase, in Finch’s eyes, are twofold: More people are being exposed to the idea of recovery high schools and more are concerned with substance-abuse issues as the nationwide opiate crisis swells. There’s also more of a view among lawmakers and the public that those with addictions require treatment.
“There have been some pretty high-profile opiate overdoses, both with celebrities and local citizens, which brought drug use to the forefront with a level of funding and urgency that doesn’t always happen,” Finch said.
“What I have found interesting in this (drug-abuse) wave is there does seem to be a spirit of treatment involved in it rather than how do we punish people, how do we find the dealers and lock them up, how do we scare people away from using.”
Finch said recovery high schools differ from after-school treatment programs in the ways they approach academics and substance abuse. Recovery schools are much smaller than traditional schools, typically serving 30 to 100 students, and rely on teachers to forge meaningful relationships with each student.
They tend to focus equally on helping students reach graduation and stay clean. Such schools are more academically focused than treatment programs, which largely try to make sure students don’t fall behind academically while they’re being treated. At recovery schools, group therapy sessions and additional resources and staff are built into each school day. ‘Supportive community’
Finch recently completed a study of whether recovery schools are more effective at preventing relapse and other ill substance-abuse effects compared to other schools. Initial data show that those in recovery schools are far less likely to relapse than their peers in traditional schools, he said.
Part of the key to keeping such kids clean, Finch said, are the relationships students form with school staff and with each other.
“I have long believed it’s the supportive community they’re in. Peer support is probably right at the top of the list,” Finch said. “Going to school all day long with a supportive peer group with whom they can identify and who accepts them for who they are, and a group that understands their struggles can help them along in healthy and positive ways.”