Parents, community react to school's drug clinic plan

Unusual? Absolutely. Successful? At times. Controversial? Less than expected.

A drug treatment clinic in a public high school, as the William Floyd school district has proposed in Suffolk County, is not a new idea, experts and officials said Wednesday.

From Hawaii to New Mexico, Washington state to upstate Rochester, it's been tried a handful of times with mixed results.

"Schools aren't designed to offer the elements of treatment; they're designed to offer education . . . so you haven't seen a lot of this," said Dr. Itai Danovitch of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, an expert on treating adolescent drug problems. "There's this kind of huge unmet need in bringing services to kids."

At William Floyd, where the nonprofit Daytop Village has applied for state approval to run an outpatient treatment program in the high school in Mastic, officials fielded phone calls Wednesday from concerned parents and national media. They began preparing a fact sheet for the district website to fend off misinformation.

Elsewhere, school-based drug treatment programs haven't provoked public outcries.

In Hawaii, the idea caught on after a methamphetamine epidemic in the late 1980s. The effort proved popular with the public and state regulators, who expanded the programs to dozens of middle and high schools on every island, said Charlie Malott, co-executive director of a YMCA-run center.

"It was unreal what was happening to the kids," she said. One concern the programs have all struggled with is privacy, Malott said. The identities of students getting treated have been revealed via teen gossip and teachers unaware of confidentiality laws, but Malott said counselors have tried to address the issue with education.

"It's a very thin line to walk," she said. "But we've never had serious problems."

In rural Washington state near Portland, Ore., two districts opened treatment centers three years ago and addressed privacy issues by creating separate entrances and exits for students.

The districts scrapped the programs when too few students signed up, said Denise Dishongh, who ran them for New Options Youth Recovery. The agency runs a separate treatment center for students in Vancouver, Wash.

"I've seen a lot more involvement here from parents, who are comfortable coming to a school-run program," Dishongh said.

New York had several school-based drug programs in the Rochester area until the mid-1990s, when they shut down after new state regulations required more record-keeping and staffing, said Bill Fulton, executive director of Delphi Drug and Alcohol Council, which ran some of the programs.

In the Mastic-Shirley area, opposition was building Wednesday. "They didn't get any collective pulse from parents in the district," complained Shirley resident Jonathan Jones.

But Patricia Conover, 45, wishes the district had the center when her son was addicted to methadone and other drugs. "If one kid gets saved, it's worth it," said Conover, whose son is now drug-free.