As anyone who has been through in-patient treatment for alcohol and drug abuse can tell you, the most upsetting time emotionally is not when you enter rehab, but when you come out. Vibrating with every fear that you used to medicate away, you’re leaving a safe environment where you’ve grown to enjoy the camaraderie of the foxhole. Days have been carefully organized; all you’ve had to do is show up and work on getting better.
Imagine leaving that environment with an aftercare program in one hand, meeting lists in the other. Sounds scary, yes?
Now imagine you’re only 16 and that your first day back starts with homeroom. The halls you must walk are pulsating with the people, places and things you’ve been advised to avoid. SATs are looming, college applications are overdue, and your lab partner used to be your dealer. By the time last period ends, the new you, clean and sober for just a few weeks, has been offered pot, pills and the pipe.
Texas: 2; New York: 0: It’s Embarrassing
Given our drug-infested society, the wonder is not that drug and alcohol use among teens (average age of 15) has reached almost epidemic proportions (65% increase in teens seeking treatment since 1992), or that an estimated 80% of teenage students who return to their old school after treatment relapse in the first week. The real wonder is that 20% manage to hang onto their sobriety in the midst of temptations that would trip up the most determined adult.
If those numbers alarm and depress you, you might take heart in another statistic on drug abuse and teenagers: sober high schools around the country consistently show that between 90 and 97% of their seniors graduate high school clean and sober.
Sober high schools have been around since the 1980s, conceived as a natural adjunct to the then new field of adolescent addiction treatment. The first two were opened in Minnesota and California, and the idea took flight. Today, Minnesota, land of ten thousand rehabs, has thirteen sober high schools. Massachusetts has three among its many prep schools; even Texas boasts two.
But the great state of New York? Zero, nada, zilch.
New York City, with 12-step meetings taking place 22 hours of every 24-hour day, is as natural a home for a sober high school as it is for, say, a performing arts high school. It makes no sense that a city that loudly praises itself for having it all has not a single school for recovering teenagers.
Heroic Measures
One New Yorker, Joe Schrank, knew the statistics only too well, and he knew how poisonous the teen’s relapses following rehabs are to the family, breaking its collective heart and eroding its finances.
In November 2006, Schrank, an addictions counselor, decided to do something about it. He sent out an email proposing to start a recovery school in New York City. Those who responded were connected only in their concern with recovery, and they met for the first time in what would become a weekly session of The Friends of Sober Education in New York.
The four years since that first meeting have been difficult as the group navigated the brutal terrain of city and state bureaucracy. More recently, in the face of draconian cuts to public school funding in the Empire State, finding the money and the political will for this project has been a Sisyphean undertaking, yet the Friends of Sober Education has continued to push that rock up the hill.
It’s Up to You, New York, NY
The goal of all sober high schools is to get each student through each school day, drug-free and sober, and every year, against all odds, to graduate a class that is clean and sober.
If we care anything about the recovering young in our society, we New Yorkers need to step it up to protect them as they are educated. We need to give our kids a sober high school, and ensure that New York’s recovering teenagers get their shot at graduating high school with knock ’em dead grades and a few 24s clean and sober under their belts.
Lesley Logan is the author of “The Unofficial Guide to London” and “Frommer’s Day by Day Guide to London.” She has been a ghostwriter, editor, copywriter, and more in her years in publishing.
