Commentary: Summer shows size of schools' drugeducation task

Joe Muldoon

School is out. Drugs are in. Summer is here. And, yes, there is a connection.

Although school is one place to buy, sell, and use drugs, it is not the
only place and is not, in fact, the venue of choice for most young people.
Through school surveys, I've asked thousands of kids in hundreds of schools
around the country to identify the times they are most likely to use
alcohol and other drugs. Summer is the No. 1 choice, followed by Christmas
vacation and spring break.

There are many reasons for this. Schools structure the day, present
challenges that are difficult to meet through a druginduced haze, and
assure that students spend a good deal of time under adult supervision. For
many kids, structure, challenges and supervision are gone when schools let
out for the summer.

Gone also are the services of schoolbased student assistance and chemical
health counselors. These are the people who confront drug users and other
troubled youth, assess the general nature of their problems, and refer them
to appropriate services. They design the programs, train the staff, run the
groups, meet the parents, contact social services, and help kids reenter
school after treatment. Some of them come to work early so that kids who
are trying to stay drugfree can get encouragement and support before the
school day begins. Some drive back in the evening to conduct educational
and support groups for parents. They work onetoone, group by group,
family by family.

These efforts, in and of themselves, cannot alter communitywide patterns
of drug use. They are not designed to. Nevertheless, extremely high
expectations are placed on these programs while support for them might be,
in a given school district, minimal to nonexistent. "What good are your
support groups? Marijuana use is still climbing."

The interventions of school counselors don't make a major splash on
actuarial radar screens. They don't grab the attention of those whose
Olympian view encompasses only sweeping changes in society. Their impact is
overlooked, blended in with a host of society's failings and averaged out
to a discouraging minus.

Sure. Cut back programs to help the poor, let their real wages stagnate or
shrink, circulate handguns like candy bars, allow 44 percent of
femaleheaded households to slip into poverty, eliminate student assistance
and chemical health positions, and, by the way, reduce drug use.

I am not against research and I do not blow off statistical findings when
they don't match my expectations. There is both truth and elegance in a
finely calculated, properly interpreted correlation coefficient. Heck, some
of my best friends are statisticians.

But the rate of drug use measured by general surveys is affected by
communitywide, multifaceted, persistent, 12monthayear programs. For
frontline school counselors, such surveys serve as estimates of need, not
measures of their own effectiveness. The rest of us learn that the big
numbers don't matter so much when it's our own daughters, sons, nieces,
nephews or grandchildren who need help. Then we realize that these services
do matter a great deal.

The great spiritual leaders don't say, "Go forth and establish programs to
lower the rate of sin in society." They exhort us to reach out, to help the
person in our presence, right here, right now. Those who win the wars don't
mutter, "Although the enemy has us surrounded, what we have to think about
is the rate and frequency of war in the world and throughout history. If we
don't address that, we're really doing no good at all." For them it's "Hold
the fort!" or "Charge!"

School counselors respond to the needs they encounter as they do the job we
have asked them to do. They are no more responsible than anyone else for
the fact that many types of drug use are on the rise. They strive not,
primarily, to stem the tide of drug use, but to pull a few souls from the
maelstrom.

The work of student assistance and chemical health counselors is not
ineffective, it is merely insufficient. There is a difference, one we
should all give thought to as summer rolls on, the new school year
approaches, and decisions on where to focus resources loom large.

Joe Muldoon lives in Minneapolis.

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