Former meth addict succeeding in life
Methamphetamine users are not just those skinny, strung out adults you see riding bicycles or fidgeting inside beat-up old cars.
They can be otherwise healthy teenagers. Teenagers like Alex Curalli used to be.
Curalli gave up drugs, if for no other reason than she became pregnant and wanted to raise a healthy baby.
She’s succeeding with 5-week-old Skylar, a healthy, beautiful boy.
But also importantly, she’s starting to succeed with herself. Curalli is graduating from high school today in a ceremony at Mirabeau Point in Spokane Valley.
“I feel like I am totally different,” she said in an interview two weeks ago.
“I want to go to college and get a bachelor’s degree and get a house and find somebody who’s not into drugs and get married,” she said about her life’s goals.
Life didn’t seem so clear just a few years ago for this native of Hillyard.
Curalli, 19, fell into a meth habit at age 15 and started living from place to place, a lifestyle she called “couch surfing.” She was arrested and tried to clean up in 2006, but after a 40-day treatment program, she relapsed. Last year, she got pregnant, then “I just quit by myself.”
Withdrawal was a wretching experience, she said, and as if that wasn’t enough hardship, Curalli’s mother died last January.
A family friend referred her to Life Services of Spokane Maternity Home where she found the support and tutoring she needed to be a mother. They helped her grieve the loss of her mother, and introduced her to Jackie McDaniel, a Spokane Valley volunteer mom who opened her home and heart to Curalli and Skylar.
Curalli has been living with McDaniel in the final weeks of her Contract Based Education alternative high school program in West Valley School District.
This fall, she plans to enroll in Spokane Community College and take a few classes while also being a mom. She isn’t sure what she wants to do for a career, but she knows she likes animals and people. “I’m going to go for my AA (associate of arts degree) for now,” she said.
Curalli credits teacher Carolyn Lanes, head of her high school Mommie’s Group, with also being like a mother and helping her find herself.
Kristin Whiteaker, administrative intern at the high school, wrote in an e-mail, “Even before her pregnancy, Alex had realized that education was a ticket away from the life she had been living. … Graduating this year has been her goal. All of her teachers here at CBE are extremely proud of Alex.”
Even when she was doing drugs, she said, she kept doing her homework. She is graduating with a 3.5 grade-point average.
Her advice to other teens: “Drugs aren’t worth it. It leads to nothing but bad. There’s nothing positive about it.”
Inside
A list of Contract Based Education graduates./18