Parents say recovery schools could help teens before addiction takes hold
'We do need to stop living in shame and denial,' says mom whose son started using drugs at age 15
Parents whose children started using drugs as teens and struggled through addiction to the point of fatally overdosing say "recovery high schools" could save lives.
Their calls for more support facilities are being supported by the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, the Canadian Mental Health Association and the operator of an Ontario recovery high school — the only one in the country that is now facing closure due to lack of funding.
Janice Walker's son was 15 when he began using marijuana, mouthwash, ecstasy and any other drug he could get.
She said he was kicked out of school and placed in an alternative education program, but that didn't help. He became an entrenched drug user and overdosed on heroin laced with fentanyl at age 25.
"We could have only dreamed of something like that," Walker said of recovery high schools, about three dozen of which exist in various U.S. states.
"Schools like this are exactly what we need because we do need to stop living in shame and denial," Walker said of rampant drug use among teens, who often start by experimenting but can become dependent on substances to deal with issues such as anxiety and depression.
Walker's son, Joe Wijohn-Walker, whom she described as highly intelligent, was expelled for using drugs and alcohol but hated the alternative education program, which he didn't complete.
"Joe said, 'I just meet the worst of the worst kids. I'm there with more kids who are using drugs, more kids who are doing bad things.'"
Canada's sole facility closing
Eileen Shewen, director of Canada's only recovery high school in Barrie, Ont., said she is in the process of shutting down the Quest Collegiate and Recovery Centres program, four years after it opened to great support.
"I met with Kathleen Wynne personally after she was elected premier, and that was on March 17, 2014," Shewen said, adding the former premier championed the facility's progressive policies during their two-hour meeting but didn't provide any funding.
She's hoping Ontario's new PC government can save her school and has prepared a private members bill with a budget to keep it going, but is looking for an MPP to take it on.
Shewen, who has a PhD in public health policy, said she modelled Quest after visiting recovery schools in the United States and learning about the "amazing" movement. The school didn't run on a semester system or have a set timeline to finish units.
"We had cooking, guitar, swimming, golf. We had circus people coming in, we had Aboriginal groups come in and do traditional healing ceremonies and teach the kids about spirituality, we had non-denominational ministering, we had everything, even Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Al-Anon."
About 30 students went through the first year at Quest, which was a residential facility for 16 months before changing to a YMCA day program as funds dwindled, said Shewen. Her cramped classroom was sandwiched between a squash and racquetball court, which would make for noisy days.
Shewen founded Quest and paid to run it after she couldn't find a supportive school for her daughter, who was "imploding" at a traditional school.
"We got the kids to open up and to trust us and to share with us what they were feeling and then eventually the academics just follow from there," she said. "They just kind of needed a reset and that's what we gave them here."
Shewen said students at Quest held each other accountable as they journeyed through a program that provided education and recovery from addiction as staff consulted psychiatrists, psychologists and family doctors.
She is still getting calls for applicants but has had to turn them away.
"I feel for these families," she said. "I don't know what happens to these kids."
Peer support for kids with addictions
Patrick Smith, national CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association, said recovery high schools in the U.S. provide students with peer support they don't get at traditional schools, which expel kids whose relapsing condition is not understood.
"It's one other failure on top of all their other failure experiences. A recovery school says, 'Why would we want to put kids in a situation where they're more likely to fail? That's demoralizing," said Smith, who is also a clinical psychologist.
"Most kids who go into treatment and then go back to their high school, they're the kids who people are whispering about in the hallway and deciding whether they're going to invite them to a party or not because there's going to be alcohol and drugs."
With files from Haydn Watters