The 4th R — Recovery: When ‘Rock Bottom’ hits before graduation, many teens finish high school one step at a time. 

Getting clean and sober is a daunting challenge for most adults struggling with drug or alcohol problems. Even after decades of abuse have broken their bodies and spirits and cost them their jobs, friends and families, most who enter treatment wind up relapsing.

Imagine then, how much harder lasting recovery must be for adolescents, many of whom got into serious trouble with booze and drugs before they were old enough to order their first legal drink.

Yet in a culture that often celebrates youthful partying and wild times as integral and entertaining rites of passage to adulthood, more and more young people are managing not only to stop drinking and drugging, but to stay stopped.

Some of these very young recovering addicts and alcoholics are enrolling in a small but increasing number of so-called recovery schools, aka “dry highs.”

Although these sober schools vary widely, all are designed to shield youngsters from the many temptations to drink and use drugs that are an unfortunate but inevitable part of teenage life at conventional schools.

“Unfortunately, sending a recovering student back to high school is like sending an alcoholic into a bar,” says Ray Peterson, a member of the Sonoma County Board of Education who was instrumental in supporting establishment of that county’s Clean and Sober Schools program almost 10 years ago. “It’s hard enough for a young person to stay sober without putting them right back into the environment where they began developing the problem in the first place. You have to change the culture.”

A place of their own

According to the Association of Recovery Schools, a group of representatives from high schools and colleges that provide safe havens for recovering students, there are at least 27 American high schools, most of them public, that meet the association’s definition of a “recovery school.” Under ARC guidelines, a recovery school is one that only enrolls students who want to stay clean and sober, offers an academic program that meets state and federal standards, requires all students to participate in a recovery program outside of school and includes some counseling support — either at the school or at a collaborating outside agency that specializes in drug or alcohol abuse.

The state does not keep statistics about the number of schools in California designed for students trying to stay clean and sober. There are at least five California schools focused primarily on students in recovery located in Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Costa Mesa, Woodland Hills and San Rafael — all operated by county offices of education. Santa Barbara County is scheduled to open a recovery school this fall.

A 17-year-old student we’ll call Steve for the purposes of this story credits Santa Rosa Clean and Sober, a community school operated by the Sonoma County Office of Education, for helping him decide he needed to turn his life around.

“I was a fighter,” says Steve, a muscular, fresh-faced high school senior. “I have a problem with anger. Every time I drank, I got into a fight. When I started doing speed, I dropped from 275 to 180 pounds in four months. My parents knew something was going on, but no one wants to admit their son’s on speed. By the end of 10th grade, I had 13 credits.”

After several arrests, an overdose, suicide attempt and a stint in juvenile hall, Steve’s probation officer ordered him to enroll at the Santa Rosa campus of Sonoma County’s Clean and Sober Schools program.

“I didn’t want to come, and for the first three weeks, I wanted to leave,” he remembers. “I thought these were a bunch of square people.”

Housed at present in a rented storefront in a gritty commercial section of town just off Highway 101, the Santa Rosa campus is one of two clean and sober schools operated by the Sonoma COE in collaboration with the non-profit Drug Abuse Alternatives Center. Using state and local bond funds to build the new facility, the county just opened a new clean and sober campus in Petaluma.

Although their facilities differ, both county clean and sober schools share some important characteristics that play a large part in their success reaching substance-abusing students.

Counselors at conventional California high schools have the highest caseloads in the country, an average of 934 students. But clean and sober schools are typically very small programs that offer both academic and career counseling, as well as regular group and individual therapy.

Many recovery schools are operated as “community day schools” which qualify for special funds to educate students who have been expelled, are truant or have other problems in conventional schools. Community day schools are designed to have low student-teacher ratios and to connect struggling students with a range of support services.

There were 19 students at the summer session at Santa Rosa Clean and Sober; and 23 at the Petaluma campus. The county provides books, facilities, teachers, office support, and a principal who also oversees six other sites. Students meet regularly with a drug educator, attend daily group therapy with a licensed social worker, and work closely with two drug counselors: all employees of Drug Abuse Alternatives.

By contrast, Windsor High School, where Steve was a student before his transfer, has three full-time counselors to advise 1,468 students.

“At this school it’s small and laid-back,” says Steve. “There’s a lot of one-on-one. If I come to school mad, I can talk to someone. If I have a question about something in class, the teacher can stop and go over it again until I understand.”

Steve gradually developed a liking for his classmates and respect for school staff. “They’re good people,” he says. “I’ve messed up since I got here. But if I tell the truth, they’re fair. They aren’t doing it for the money: they don’t get paid enough to be hanging around with a bunch of addicts. They really care what happens to us.”

Andrew Finch, executive director of the Association of Recovery Schools and director of the Community High School in Nashville, Tenn., says membership in the organization has doubled since it was established three years ago. “We’re relatively new as a concept, although there have been sober high schools operating in the country since the ’80s,” he says.

Ongoing struggle

In a field where relapse is considered a hallmark of the disease of addiction, the figures on adolescent treatment are, in the words of one expert, especially “dismal.”

The Hazelden Center for Youth and Families, part of the well-known Minnesota-based substance abuse treatment and research foundation, estimates that 85 percent of teenage students in treatment will relapse within three months of returning to their old high schools. Finch says one study of adolescents returning from treatment found nearly all reported they were invited to use drugs or alcohol their first day back at school.

In California, hundreds of school districts and county offices of education offer a wide array of drug-abuse prevention and education services in dozens of different school settings. The 2003-04 California Student Survey showed the trend line inching downward for adolescent use of certain drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, in some categories. Nonetheless, the statistics on adolescent drinking and drug use continue to indicate that significant numbers of California children are engaging in dangerous behavior.

The latest student survey found that 11.5 percent of 9th graders and 23 percent of 11th graders reported they are “binge drinkers” who had consumed five or more drinks in a row within the last 30 days. More than a third of these self-described bingers said they engaged in three or more episodes of drinking and driving (by themselves or a friend); a third reported they had gone to school drunk or high on drugs.

“Nearly two-thirds of 11th graders who used any alcohol in the past 30 days reported bingeing,” researchers wrote, “making this the predominant pattern of alcohol use. Furthermore, about half of binge drinkers reported bingeing on three or more days. This suggests that one-third of drinkers in the 11th grade are regular, weekly drinkers.”

These patterns, researchers concluded, underscore the need for more school-based intervention and prevention programs.

National figures indicate a growing need to support teens in recovery. More and more adolescents are seeking treatment, some of them as young as 13 or 14 years old. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported that the number of adolescents going into treatment nationally jumped 56 percent between 1992 and 2002, from 95,000 admissions to 156,000. Half of these teenagers came to treatment through the criminal justice system, a figure that indicates that drinking and drug use have already had serious consequences for these youngsters.

Programs threatened

It’s difficult to design a program for a clean and sober school, although recovery schools association director Finch has just published a handbook on the subject. The intensive services that these students need are expensive, which has become an increasingly serious problem after recent years of drastic reductions in discretionary funds for school districts and county offices of education.

Sonoma County’s clean and sober program, one of the oldest in California, has drastically trimmed its administrative staff.

“We used to be small enough that the principal knew the name of every student at the school,” says Patsy Truxaw, who was once part of a three-person team of principals that oversaw the county’s two clean and sober schools and other alternative education programs.

After more than five years with the Clean and Sober Schools program, Truxaw’s position was eliminated in June. Now a single administrator handles the job. “We had really made some progress,” she says. “I feel sad and frustrated because we had gotten the program to a point where we had enough kids who were clean and committed to recovery, and now it’s in danger. I hope the quality of the program and relationships can remain strong given the significant reduction in supervision.”

Finding funding

Programs in California can tap into a number of state and federal categorical and grant funds to augment their state average daily attendance funds. Many operate as “community day,” “community” or court schools, all of which qualify for special funds. Clean and sober schools can sometimes qualify for Proposition 99 tobacco-tax funds, state funds for school safety programs and federal Safe and Drug-Free Schools program money. But most schools must also seek private and foundation funds to stay afloat.

Santa Barbara County Superintendent Bill Cirone, who is a passionate supporter of school-based sobriety programs, says he had reluctantly concluded that the county could not “in good conscience” open a sober school at the same time budget cuts were forcing layoffs and program cuts throughout the county.

When planners calculated an operating budget for the new sobriety school, the numbers showed that the program would rack up a $200,000 deficit its first year. But support for the idea of supporting kids in recovery was widespread in the community.

“In seven weeks, the community raised $475,000 to help finance school operations for the first three years,” Cirone says.

Summit High School is scheduled to open this fall in Santa Barbara. The new school, which will begin with 12 students in a single class, will operate out of the ground floor of a building owned by the National Council on Alcohol Abuse, the county’s partner in the project. Summit will accept only students who have completed treatment, which makes the program different from many of California’s other sober schools.

“We visited sober high schools in Colorado and Minnesota [center of the sober schools movement, thanks in part to its proximity to Hazelden],” says Cirone. “We think we have come up with a good model. The school will have high academic standards and offer individualized instruction.”

The county will cover the costs of teachers and staff, the facility and instructional materials; the school will contract with professional drug and alcohol counselors from the council offices upstairs to run the therapeutic program.

Cirone says during his visits to other sober schools he was sad to see how much drugs and alcohol had damaged the lives of some very young addicts. “At the same time,” he adds, “it can be very inspiring to see how well many of these students are doing.“

Not all communities are eager to have a school for former drug and alcohol abusers in their midst.

Sonoma County school board member Peterson remembers irate citizens “getting in my face” when he traveled to civic and community groups to raise support for the county’s Clean and Sober Schools program. Armed with a PowerPoint presentation and testimonials from experts about the extent of underage drinking and drug use in the region, Peterson still found the program a hard sell.

“They found it difficult to believe that these kids weren’t outsiders,” he says. “I had to convince them that ‘These are your children.’ If they’re not in school, they’ll be walking the streets.”

Peterson is gratified that the county received state bond funds to build a new facility for the Petaluma campus. But he is frustrated at the lack of stability for the Santa Rosa school. “We’re in storefronts and shopping centers, and it’s not unusual for us to be evicted midway through the school year,” he sighed. “We’ve had a number of sites fall through because potential sellers get discouraged (from selling or renting). A school like this has got to be in a neighborhood that accepts or tolerates it because on occasion these students will act out.”

Clean and sober schools may have an easier time leveraging federal funds, once they have the data to show that their programs qualify as “evidence-based programs” with demonstrated results as required by the No Child Left Behind Act. There are no sobriety schools listed among the model programs on the Safe and Drug-Free Community Schools Web site because there haven’t been any scientific studies to measure results. Some campuses keep their own statistics, however.

Lisa Schwartz, principal of the Phoenix Academy in San Rafael — a charter school operated by the Marin County Office of Education — says more than 80 percent of the school’s students stay sober and go on to graduate from high school. (See "Phoenix Academy helps young alcoholics rise from the ashes")

Established first as a “sober classroom” in 1991, Phoenix has a 10-year record as a charter school. Schwartz says students whose parents participate in therapy sessions with them are most likely to make it. “It’s extremely difficult for an adolescent to separate him or herself from her peers and to learn new ways of having fun, of being a student, of being in a family,” she says.

Recovery school association director Finch and researcher Paul Moberg, director of the University of Wisconsin, have received a $275,000 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to support a two-year survey of recovery schools in the country that have been in existence two years or more.

“Anyone who has spent any time at one of these schools knows that they work,” Finch says. “But up until now, most of our information has been anecdotal. We want to collect data about what’s going on at these schools. How do they define success?"

But it could be risky to rely solely on statistical success rates to prove the worth of clean and sober schools. Recovering adolescents are a notoriously difficult population. Programs that require students to complete a treatment program and be committed to staying clean, have a better chance of success.

Staying clean

Most very young drinkers usually haven’t had time to suffer some of the extreme consequences that drive their elders into treatment, although the ravages of some drugs like crystal meth, crank and crack send some youngsters into treatment after relatively short using careers.

Recovery schools that require students to have a serious commitment to staying clean have a better chance of maintaining a stable enrollment. But many recovery schools take referrals from juvenile justice and the State Attendance Review Board — the students “that have nowhere else to go,” says Erica Clementi, a licensed clinical social worker from Drug Abuse Alternatives Center, who works at Santa Rosa Clean and Sober.

Although they may have serious drug or alcohol problems, many young substance abusers may not feel as comfortable with traditional 12-step recovery programs like Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, which are typically made up of older drinkers and drug users. And because denial is a major part of the disease, experts say, it’s even harder for youngsters to admit that they have a problem.

“Some students just haven’t lost enough,” Clementi says. “They go to A.A. or N.A. and they don’t see anyone they can relate to. They haven’t usually lost jobs or kids or houses. They may see their friends abuse drugs and alcohol without suffering any consequences.”

Some adolescents who abuse drugs as youngsters may find they can drink normally once they are adults. It doesn’t matter, says Finch, whether students who stay clean through high school are “real” alcoholics or addicts.

At the very least, says Finch, youngsters who are abstinent during their adolescence have a better chance of making it through their childhoods without incurring permanent brain damage, getting in trouble with the law or killing themselves or someone else while driving under the influence.

For those students with serious and lasting abuse problems, however, attending a clean and sober school can be a life-changing and life-saving experience. “I just got an invitation to the college graduation of a young woman, a single mother, with whom I worked from the time she was 17 until she was 21,” Clementi says. “Recovery has not only made a tremendous difference in her life, it has also had a huge impact on the life of her daughter.”

Carol Brydolf (cbrydolf@csba.org) is a writer for California Schools.