All school districts should have Narcan

Every school district should have Narcan. If the word is still unfamiliar to you, it should not be to educators. It’s the brand name for naloxone, which can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.

There has been progress in making it more available, but it hasn’t been fast enough to catch up with the crisis involving the likes of fentanyl.

A survey of Connecticut school districts indicates that it’s not available at all in many of them. The state Department of Education wasn’t even able to get responses from every district, but of the 178 that participated, 107 reported having Narcan in at least one of their schools. Almost 40 percent — 71 districts — have none available.

Crunch the numbers a little harder and it’s clear that having it in a single school in a municipality won’t help when the crisis is across town.

The survey was conducted after a seventh-grade student overdosed on fentanyl at the Sport and Medical Sciences Academy in Hartford in January.

The decision on whether to stock schools with Narcan is left to individual districts in Connecticut. Some states, such as Rhode Island and New Jersey, put it in every building.

There’s no reason not to do the same in Connecticut. The opioid crisis has been around too long to ignore. It’s also impossible to dismiss as a problem in other towns.

Out cities do top the list. The tally of accidental overdose deaths from 2015-22 is led by Hartford, with 541, followed by Waterbury (468), New Haven (426), Bridgeport (415), New Britain (279), Danbury (128), Norwalk (99) and Stamford (98).

Even the wealthiest of suburbs have suffered as well, with fatal overdoses recorded during the same seven years in Greenwich (12) Darien (8) and New Canaan (7). Fairfield had 46.

A decade ago, there were 357 accidental drug overdoses in Connecticut, 14 of which were attributed to fentanyl. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, fentanyl was cited in 85 percent of the 1,378 such deaths in our state.

Those rising numbers would have been worse without Narcan. It’s been almost eight years since then-Gov. Dannel Malloy signed a bill making it possible for anyone with a prescription to get naloxone, and to shield anyone administering it in good faith from civil and criminal liability.

It does require some training to administer. In the case of an overdose, which can occur simply from the ingestion of too many painkillers, breathing slows down. It can take 90 minutes for it to stop completely. During that window, the use of Narcan via injection or a nasal spray can reverse the effects in two to five minutes. It can also prevent brain injuries.

But it’s useless if it’s not available. We already ask so much of our educators. There’s no need to train every adult in a school on how to use Narcan, but it should be available in the nurse’s office, as omnipresent in a school building as a fire extinguisher or a first aid kit.

The decision on whether to stock schools with Narcan is left to individual districts in Connecticut. Some states, such as Rhode Island and New Jersey, put it in every building.