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A Northshore Recovery High School student paints in class. The Beverly, Mass., school is one of the state’s three recovery schools that mandates summer programs.
As a student at Robbinsdale Armstrong High School in North Plymouth, Minn., Grant couldn’t decide which he liked better, OxyContin or cocaine, so he took a lot of each. “My mom always told me I was a brilliant scholar when I was sober, but most of the school days I was pretty much up in the clouds,” he recalls.
By sophomore year, his life had gotten so off track that he spent more than three months at the residential substance abuse program at Thistledew, a Minnesota Department of Corrections juvenile facility for teens. When he was released this April, Grant knew that he didn’t want to return to his high school. “If I went back, I’d be using within a week,” he says. “If I went there, I might not be alive. My next relapse was going to be a big relapse.”
A Drug-Free Environment
Instead, Grant applied to Sobriety High School in Minnesota, one of 35 public recovery high schools scattered around the country. With fewer than 60 students, Sobriety is a big change from the 1,500-student Robbinsdale Armstrong or any other traditional high school—and that’s the whole point.
Recovery high schools are designed specifically to serve students who have been through a professional substance abuse treatment program and are working to stay away from drugs and alcohol. The schools typically serve multiple districts and are funded from both the per-pupil state funds that follow a student and what districts raise themselves. Nationwide, recovery high schools are operated as charter schools, schools within a school, schools that share a building, and stand-alone schools. In a school within a school, recovering students are in some or all classes together but remain students of the public high school with the same administration. In a shared building several schools operate, but each has its own classes and principal. What they have in common is a commitment to providing a safe haven and support for students learning to deal with addiction.
Students at Northshore Recovery High School read during their lunch break.
“For students in recovery, returning to their former high school environment is returning to where their using friends are, where their connections are,” says Monique Bourgeois, the executive director of the Association of Recovery Schools (www.recoveryschools.org) and a licensed alcohol and drug counselor at Solace Academy, a recovery high school in Chaska, Minn. “It’s no different from asking an adult coming out of substance abuse treatment to return to his or her favorite bar six hours a day, five days a week.”
To ensure that staff and students can have very close relationships, recovery high schools keep class sizes low. The schools have a counselor on staff and typically devote some of the school day to talking through issues, asking students to be honest about their use, their troubles and their thoughts—an almost painful level of transparency. Most require students to be enrolled in a 12-step program, like Alcoholics Anonymous. “We tell our stories and what’s going on day to day. Everyone is open, and that’s really good,” Grant says. “I like that it’s sober people and a sober environment. Everyone is in NA [Narcotics Anonymous] or AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], working with their sponsor and working the steps. I’ve got the support and motivation I think I need to stay sober.”
A Model for Success
There is no shortage of students like Grant. More than two million youths nationwide aged 12 to 17, or 8.2 percent of that population, meet the criteria for a substance abuse diagnosis, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (www.samhsa.gov). To meet this need, the first recovery high schools opened 20 years ago. Ten years later there were only about a half dozen.
If You're Considering Starting a Recovery High School ... Andrew Finch, co-founder of the Association of Recovery Schools, has seen dozens of recovery schools launched, many of which were unable to remain viable. Here are some key suggestions for making a recovery school a successful, long-standing resource for your district.
Stay small. "Fight the temptation to do a 150-student school," Finch says. "If the district thinks it has that kind of need, it's better off with multiple sites than one big one."
Don't worry about the model. Focus on the mission and culture of the school, using whatever model works best for your district.
Staff for success. No matter how small the school is, include an alcohol and drug counselor and a coordinator. "Sometimes the coordinator is a program director or a lead teacher. But you need someone who oversees the day-to-day administration duties and works closely with the students," Finch says.
Limit enrollment to students in recovery who want to attend. It may be tempting to use a recovery high school as a place for students with ongoing substance abuse issues. But the environment at the heart of recovery high schools' success is predicated on students who are committed to working on their sobriety and want to be at the school.
But the trend is accelerating. Today, Andrew Finch, co-founder and former executive director of the Association of Recovery Schools, says he knows of about 35 public recovery high schools in the country, each serving students who are addicted to substances ranging from alcohol to marijuana to crack. There are also a handful of similar private schools as well.
“Most of these schools start from grassroots advocacy efforts, often by parents or teachers who see a need,” Finch says. The big exception is in Massachusetts, where three years ago the state provided nonprofits with funds to launch three recovery high schools, each of which offers enrollment to multiple districts (as do most recovery high schools). “We do a year-round schedule with a mandated summer program to keep them connected to the school,” says Michelle Lipinski, the principal of Northshore Recovery High School in Beverly, one of the three Massachusetts schools.
With fewer than 50 students, Northshore is, like Sobriety High, a small school. In researching 18 recovery high schools nationwide, Finch found that the average student body was about 30 students, with some schools having as few as seven to 10 students. “They have to go the extra mile to ensure alcohol and drug use is out of the school. It has to be part of the culture,” he says. “When everybody knows everybody else, then the students can police themselves to a degree.”
