LoudounNow LOUDOUN COUNTY’S COMMUNITY-OWNED NEWS SOURCE
[ Vol. 2, No. 3 ]
[ loudounnow.com ]
Nov. 24 – 30, 2016 ]
Rise and shine. It’s brunch time.
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Alumni May Revive Union Street School BY DANIELLE NADLER
Douglas Graham/Loudoun Now
Loudoun County shut down its drug court four years ago. Now, with opioid addiction on the rise, county leaders are considering reviving the program.
Drug Court Finds New Advocates BY RENSS GREENE
T
his week, Virginia State Health Commissioner Dr. Marissa J. Levine declared the opioid addiction epidemic a public health emergency and issued an order allowing all Virginians to obtain Naloxone, which counteracts an opioid overdose. Last year, Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA-10) got together with Loudoun law enforcement to launch a Heroin Operations Team to battle the crisis. And in 2014, for the first time in Virginia, more people died from opioid overdoses than fatal car accidents. In the face of a towering drug addiction crisis, leaders in Loudoun County government and courts are giving serious thought to bringing back Loudoun’s drug court. From 2004 to 2012, some drug offenders got a chance to avoid jail time after violating probation by going instead to a special drug treatment court program. That diversion program was an intensive, outpatient process for treating addiction,
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It would behoove us to get on this issue as fast as possible, if we’re going to save money and save lives.
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with cooperation from county government, law enforcement, probation officers, the judiciary, the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, social services, and mental health professionals. Offenders could choose intensive supervision and mandatory treatment instead of jail, and if they fell off the wagon again, they could wind up back behind bars. But in 2012, supervisors decided they
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weren’t getting their money’s worth and pulled funding for the program. A third-party cost-benefit analysis of the program had trouble coming up with definitive numbers, but noted the county paid more per participant than other jurisdictions running similar programs. Tight restrictions on who was eligible for the drug court meant that comparatively few people went through the program—20 in a year at most. “There’s an efficiency that you get out of numbers, so I think that’s probably where some of the costs were,” said Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Plowman, one of the leading critics of the previous drug court when it was shut down. “You didn’t have that economy of scale.” For one thing, offenders who sold drugs were excluded—but Loudoun Circuit Court Presiding Judge Burke F. McCahill said most drug addicts sell some amount to support their habits. And County Chairwoman Phyllis J. Randall (D-At Large)—a career mental DRUG COURT >> 39 ✃
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There’s a story behind the aging, two-story building near the southern edge of Leesburg’s Union Cemetery. The school system has used it for storage since the late ’50s, but for 75 years, it was a centerpiece of education for Loudoun County’s black students. Guthrie Ashton, now 77, attended elementary school there. He walked to class each day from his home on the south end of town, near where Food Lion is today. “It was a hike. The school was across town from where most blacks lived,” he said. Stories like Ashton’s, and those of so many others who spent their formative years at that school, may get new life. The Douglass Alumni Association and the Loudoun Freedom Center have plans to either lease or purchase the historic structure, plus a second brick building next door, and turn it into a living museum. The Douglass Alumni Association includes many men and women, now in their 70s and 80s, who attended the school on Union Street when it was known as the Leesburg Training School, Leesburg Colored School, and later as Douglass Elementary School. The building served as a school until 1958, when Frederick Douglass Elementary School opened on Sycolin Road. The Loudoun Freedom Center is working alongside those alumni to eventually move into the Union Street school. The move would be in line with the nonprofit’s mission to restore and preserve sites that were important to Loudoun’s black residents. “We have first-hand accounts of what it was like to attend school there,” said Michelle Thomas, founder and executive director of the Loudoun Freedom Center. “We want to help them tell their story.” The Loudoun County School Board is taking the first steps to set that plan into motion. At its meeting Tuesday, it is expected to unanimously approve on its consent agenda spending $3,500 to have the property at 20 Union St. surveyed. The UNION STREET SCHOOL >> 38
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