Norwin schools call attention to community’s problem with opioids
As some 20 people walked down a dark hallway in an empty school on a cold night in Irwin, two police officers appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, grabbed a young woman in a black T-shirt and pushed her against a wall.
“You bought dope in the parking lot!” one of the officers barked, as they cuffed the woman, rather roughly.
That was the opening scene of the “Reality Tour” sponsored by the Norwin Lions Club, staffed by volunteers and promoted to the Norwin School District’s students and parents. Over the following 20 minutes, the audience — half parents, half kids — moved through the school and witnessed wellacted scenes in which the young woman spent the night in
withdrawal in a jail cell and went to the emergency room for an overdose. In the concluding funeral scene, there was no body in the casket, but there was a mirror captioned with the message: “Don’t let this be you.”
The tour is just part of Norwin’s 3-year-old effort to arrest the opioid crisis.
The district, which encompasses Irwin, North Irwin and North Huntingdon, held a forum in October 2015 hosted by forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht and including experts in pain management, pharmacy and drug rehabilitation, plus two people in recovery.
“It was a very powerful message sent out to the community,” said Timothy McCabe, assistant principal of Norwin High School. “This is out there everywhere. Unless we start working together to stop this problem, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
It has gotten worse. In 2015, Westmoreland County saw 126 fatal overdoses. Last year, there were at least 192. Some victims have been as young as 21.
“We’re losing our alumni,” said Timothy Kotch, the district’s assistant superintendent of secondary education.
Some schools try to avoid the reputational hit they fear might come from being labeled as a district with a drug problem, said Robert Vincent, a public health analyst at the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. “If I happen to be a school district that is paintedas a drug district, then people make economic decisions that sometimes affect the entire community,” he said. People move out, or decidenot to move in.
Far from trying to hide, Norwin launched a 90-member awareness effort. “We’re here to save lives,” superintendent William Kerr said at a January meeting of the district’s K-12 Operation Prevention Advisory Committee. “And we need to start earlier with this message, the elementary level, which we are, with age-appropriate curriculum.”
Norwin’s policies include three-day suspensions for drug possession, but that punishment is served in an alternative learning center, not at home. The policies emphasize prevention, and drug rehabilitation for students with problems. The district has placed 36 doses of the opioid-reversal drug naloxone across its buildings, none of which it has had to use. And it has reached out to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Saint Vincent College Prevention Projects.
All schools in Westmoreland County get prevention help from Saint Vincent College, funded by the county. Norwin pays an extra $2,500 for more services.
Prevention starts in preschool, where the focus isn’t on drugs, per se. “We start with making choices,” said Donna A. Kean, executive director of the college’s Prevention Projects. “How to be a friend.How to pick friends.”
From kindergarten through around sixth grade, Ms. Kean’s team brings to the schools a program called Realistic Education About Life, or REAL, which involves six separate lessons most years. Along with more decision-making education, it offers coping skills, health concepts and guidance in how to decline drugs. By sixth grade, the kids get 11 lessons per year including information about street drugs and overthe-counter medicines.
From seventh grade on, they get a curriculum called Too Good for Drugs and Violence, which can involve 10 or 12 lessons per year, and they talk through common scenarios. “You’re an athlete. You got injured. You were prescribed this,” Ms. Kean said. “You took it as you were supposed to, but that makes you more predisposed to possibly abusing a chemical substancein the future.”
Norwin is also one of the pilot schools for the DEA’s new curriculum, Operation Prevention. “It was something we could easily mesh with our current curriculum,” said Lisa Banasick, assistant principal of Norwin’s Hillcrest Intermediate School. “All packaged together, and it was all free.”
“Will this work?” the superintendent asked himself. “Well, we have to make every effort to make sure that we convey a message to young people about addiction and how it affects the brain and the body.”