Victims of the Drug Crisis
Students caught in the middle and how schools are helping
A student wakes in the middle of the night
to use the rest room and finds her mother sitting at the kitchen table with a needle in her arm. An entire family of students removed from their home due to substance use by parents. Two students with parents who died of overdoses.
They’re stories all from just one school—all told by just one school employee. The impact of the opioid crisis in Maine is no longer slowly creeping into public schools, it’s prevalent in many areas with students struggling to separate home life from school life. And things are only getting worse. Maine saw 418 people die of overdoses in 2017, an 11 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Maine Attorney General’s Office. Most of those deaths were caused by opioids with the drug fentanyl overtaking heroin as the most deadly drug on the streets. The drug epidemic in Maine has increasingly impacted students in Maine, and in turn their ability to learn. Maine Educator sat down with a school nurse in Central Maine to talk about how students’ home life, where parents are using drugs is affecting school life and what can be done to 10
Maine Educator • April 2018
"What a feeling as a child to feel like their parent believes 'this high is more important than me.' Kids hang in the balance, suspended, hoping there is a safety net to catch them." help those students in need. To protect the privacy of the students Maine Educator is not naming the nurse or the school, in the following Q&A. Can you share some of the stories you’ve heard from students when it comes to parental drug use? What is really happening at home? One student came to school distraught because she got up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with a needle in her arm. In this same home, the mother took the high school student's television (it had been a gift from another family member) and sold it for money to buy drugs. In this same home, a younger sibling's game system (also a gift) was also sold for money to buy drugs. The mother sold the stuff and then defaulted on the rent and the kids had no place to go. Usually grandparents step in, and you hope the kids are together. Can you imagine parents stealing from you to advance their cause? There are students who come to talk to me and say things like, “I’m really anxious because I’m afraid my mother is going to start using again, or my mother came back to the state and she says she’s clean but I don’t want to have to deal with it because I don’t know if I believe her.” Those are just the students who open up. It is striking, that often, the student knows about their parents' drug habits, but have been "groomed" to say nothing.
