Wake-Up Call When It Was Discovered That Students Were Using Lsd, Parents Started A Task Force To Fight The Problem

Six months ago, three students at Northwood Junior High School were rushed to Holy Family Hospital after taking LSD between morning classes.

The girls are fine, but the Mead School District’s safe, secure, middle-class image was badly shaken by the November incident.

Word spread: Some junior high kids were saving their allowances to buy marijuana. A few kids found out that LSD was a relative bargain. A hit of acid cost about $3 - the same as a double cafe latte.

“You could walk down the school hallway and hear people talking, ‘Are you going to get ripped tonight,”’ said one of the three girls, who spoke anonymously. “Everybody could get it from everybody.”

Administrators believe most junior high students stayed drug free.

But those who didn’t broke stereotypes about who used drugs. They included kids on the student council, kids in athletics, kids who had high grade point averages. At Mead, drug use crossed the socioeconomic lines.

“Kids of all types were involved in this stuff,” Northwood Junior High principal Joanne Rehburg said. “It’s no longer a little group of stoners.”

In the six months since drug use in Mead’s junior high schools came to the surface, parents and school staff formed a community task force to deal with the problem.

“It is the community mobilizing,” assistant superintendent Scott Menard said. “It’s not the school district making it happen, it’s the parents. It would have been pretty easy to bury our heads in the sand when LSD happened, but we didn’t.”

So far the task force has:

Opened a telephone hotline for students, parents and staff to anonymously call and report drugs, alcohol or weapons on campus.

Networked parents so they can better monitor their children’s friends and activities.

Circulated a survey - already 30 percent of the surveys have been returned - to find the family values of district parents and better understand what led to the drug use.

While most of the drug use happened off school grounds, the three girls who took LSD at school shook the district. Many students saw two of the three rolled out of Northwood on stretchers.

“I feel like this was a wake-up call for us to activate and deal with the problem,” Northwood assistant principal Joe Riddlington said. “By intervening maybe we saved their lives, maybe we saved them from further pain.”

After the November LSD incident, eight students were suspended or expelled from school. Half of them petitioned for readmission and have returned to Mead schools. Others are attending private schools or schools in other districts. A couple of the students have not returned to any school.

The incident also motivated hundreds of parents. Like a family intervention with an alcoholic, the district held a meeting last November where students, parents and school officials came together.

At first, there was finger-pointing. Parents wondered why the school wasn’t on top of the problem. But Riddlington told them: “The school is the meeting place - not the source or the answer.

“I think society has a drug problem,” he said. “I don’t believe our problem is any worse than society’s at large.”

In the course of discussions, parents and staff decided that if everyone shared what they know about the problem, perhaps they might begin to solve it together.

“I think we have more power as parents than we thought we had,” said Kathy Stelzner, a parent involved in starting Mead’s drug-use prevention programs. “They (district officials) either wanted to hear us or they were forced to hear us. But they listened.”

Four hundred parents turned out for the first meeting to talk about the problem. Six months later, more than 100 parents are still actively involved in a task force.

The unavoidable challenge for parents and school staffs is junior high school. In seventh grade, children leave their 300-student elementary schools and enter Mead’s overcrowded junior high schools, which each have about 950 students.

“Some of these kids who were using are wonderful kids, good students, personable, kind to their peers, but the availability and the temptation was real great,” Riddlington said. “Every kid in this building is unsure of themselves and desperately wants to be accepted. The most important thing at this age is to be accepted by their peers.”

One of the girls who used LSD at Northwood said last week that upon entering junior high she wanted to be a part of the social scene. Drinking was one step she could take toward that goal. When talk of drugs came up, she said, “I was just extremely curious about them.”

Parent Luisa Paolone said she and others can be lulled into thinking their junior high students are grown up because they’re maturing.

“I think as parents when our kids reach that magic grade - grade seven - we feel like they are mature,” she said. “But I think they need us now more than when all they needed was a change of diaper and a bottle. The mind games are more critical than the physical games.”

Many Mead parents have looked critically at their own attitudes about drug use to understand why their junior high children started using it.

Paolone said many parents of today’s schoolchildren came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, when marijuana and LSD were in their heyday. Some task force members believe some students raided their parents’ marijuana supplies as well as their liquor cabinets.

“It’s almost like it’s OK for our kids to use because there are worse things they could do,” Paolone said. “It’s like drug use is more tolerated by my generation of parents - until it’s their own kids who start.”

All the talk about making Mead schools a zero-tolerance zone for drug use has forced some change in student behaviors.

“I’m not naive enough to think the kids aren’t using drugs,” assistant principal Riddlington said. “But I think they’re keeping them away from school.”