Editor’s note: This commentary is by T. Elijah Hawkes, who is co-principal at Randolph Union High School. His writing about adolescence, schooling and democracy appears in Huffington Post, Rethinking Schools, and other publications.
[T]his legislative session, Gov. Peter Shumlin is advocating for increased funding to support a child welfare system that’s struggling with kids and families caught in our opiate addiction crisis.
Political leaders are right to place the problem front and center on the agenda. But do we have the political will and funding to pay for what’s needed? The Burlington Free Press predicts a struggle: “Money is tight … some legislators are hesitant.”
But with a problem as big as this one, it’s not a question of whether a society allocates resources to address the challenge. Pay for it we will. It’s a question of how intentional we are about it.
The New York Times recently reported that – in contrast to other Western nations – the death rate of white men in the U.S. is increasing. Why? It’s largely because of addiction: “rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.”
Again, with a problem this big, it’s not a matter of whether we’re going to pay for it. Somewhere, somehow, additional resources are going to be committed to addressing this crisis.
Bess O’Brien’s 2013 film, “The Hungry Heart,” shows how it may be through our primary care doctors that resources find their way to the problem. This means families may find that kids with the flu wait longer to see the doctor because he’s making time to work with a teen addict. And a new film by Steven Okazaki, “Heroin: Cape Cod, USA,” opens with a local police officer pounding on the chest of a dead man lying on the roadside: an overdose. So maybe we’ll pay for the crisis with first responders, finding our cops less able to tend to other concerns while they address the acute challenges of addiction. Or maybe we’ll pay for it through our hospital emergency rooms, and find that less space is available for normal emergencies when beds are taken by those experiencing violent sickness from withdrawal. Or maybe we’ll pay for it through higher insurance premiums or money spent on home security measures – to say nothing of the anxiety and trauma that arise when homes are ransacked and robbed by desperate ones.
Or maybe we’ll pay for it through our schools. We talk a lot about the cost of schooling. How do we want our educators to spend their time and our tax dollars?
I’m also confident that no matter what happens in Montpelier this legislative session, the lives caught up in the opiate crisis will get lived, and the pain and the cost of their struggle will walk down our streets, into our buildings and lives, demanding our time and care.
As a middle/high school principal, I take this last question especially seriously. Just before the holiday recess, I was working with colleagues on plans for a math assessment, to help us determine proficiency in algebra and pre-algebra skills. Because of a young woman in crisis that morning, we didn’t spend as much time as we’d planned on the task. In other words, we didn’t spend as many Vermonter tax dollars on the task.
What walked into school that morning, among the 400-plus students we see every day, was a girl who was troubled by what people in town were saying about her mother’s overdose. The child’s instability that day was such that it required attention from a principal as well as a school counselor. For me, it was opiates or Algebra that morning – and Algebra was put on hold.
I’m reminded of another girl, who tried really hard one day last fall to get caught being bad. She was in possession of something illegal, and she did what she had to do to get caught. Why? Because she was trying to get suspended, to violate the terms of her probation, to get the courts back on her case, and get herself removed from her current home. It was rebellion born of rage about not being able to live with her biological mom, a woman who struggles with addiction. I don’t recall what I was working on that morning. Perhaps I was in a meeting with our new Spanish teacher. Foreign language got set aside for addiction.
I’m reminded of a boy, one of the toughest kids in school. A school counselor told me of an unexpected meeting she had with him one day in December. He was crying, sobbing. He told her how each day he wonders if today’s the day he’ll start to shoot heroin. He lives with a lot of pain in his heart, and he’s confronted with a powerful painkiller within easy reach, every day, and it calls him. The counselor listened. It was college recommendations or heroin that day – and college was put on hold.
If what we’ve got is a public health crisis, then public institutions, including our schools, will respond. And it’s not always crisis management mode. There are very intentional ways that schools can prepare for and work with children in crisis. Pedagogy, curriculum, guidance, discipline, school culture, extra-curriculars, community partnerships: a smart school mobilizes in many ways to effectively address the diversity of abilities and needs that walk in the door each day.
And it’s important that all of our public institutions be as intentional as possible in addressing opiate addiction in our communities. We must decide: Which professionals do we want working on what aspects of this problem? What are the most cost-efficient and high-impact approaches? How can we find the money?
I don’t know if Shumlin’s particular proposals are the best ones, but from my vantage point in the schools, I can confidently say that we have a child welfare system in need of additional resources.
I’m also confident that no matter what happens in Montpelier this legislative session, the lives caught up in the opiate crisis will get lived, and the pain and the cost of their struggle will walk down our streets, into our buildings and lives, demanding our time and care.
Children we have not borne
bedevil us by becoming
themselves
painfully sharp and unavoidable
like a needle in our flesh.
That’s from an Audre Lorde poem called “To My Daughter The Junkie on The Train.” It was written in New York City, back before heroin was a rural Vermont problem. Alas, it’s our problem now, “painfully sharp and unavoidable,” demanding leadership and vision from our legislators this session.
