You’d hope that a headline like “Alcohol, drug use
persists among island teens” would draw a bit more
of a response.
But there they sat at the School Board meeting Thursday evening, all of the usual suspects – a dozen administrators, counselors and teachers, three reporters, and one random fellow who may or may not have been a parent – and no one else, as the glum results of the latest Healthy Youth Survey were presented. The two high school students who showed up for the meeting weren’t there to talk about alcohol and drugs at all; after objecting to the planned axing of some cherry trees in the way of the new BHS wing, they were out the door.
The stark numbers: Alcohol use by Bainbridge twelfth graders well outpaces their peers statewide, and 65 percent say they or their friends have smoked marijuana in the past year; 80 percent said they could get alcohol if they wanted, and less than 25 percent say they would get caught by their parents if they drank; 27 percent report having been high or drunk at school. The good news: tobacco use is about on par with kids in other communities. The cruel irony: Bainbridge teens who’ve moved on to harder drugs tend to eschew the dangerous but “low class” meth – in favor of cocaine.
School Board member Mike Foley gamely suggested that students could be “energized” on drug and alcohol issues with some new and unspecified awareness effort. Clayton Mork, the administrator charged yet again with delivering the bad news, conceded, “We’ll never be finished and we’ll never give up on this challenging issue, but it does get frustrating.”
The responses were telling, precisely because the community has already tried to make headway against teen and drug and alcohol use to no apparent avail. A few years ago, similarly dismal survey results and some alcohol-related tragedies involving young people touched off a wave of indignation and concern. The Just Know Coalition and Mama Llamas family support group were formed, and various agencies sponsored day-long workshops to bring teens and parents together to confront risky behavior. Two years later, the survey results are as bad or worse. Individual teens may have been steered away from self-destructive habits – and thank goodness for that – but in the aggregate, the awareness efforts are a failure. The numbers don’t lie.
Wednesday on this page, one school official put the challenge squarely where many believe it belongs: on parents. The fact that the teen risk survey is administered in the classroom is incidental, because schools only have stewardship of our young people so many hours of the day. What island teens do away from campus, at parties on Friday and Saturday nights in private homes, isn’t the school district’s affair – it’s the parents’. So we’ll say it again: teen alcohol and drug use isn’t a school problem, it’s a family problem.
What now? Just Know soldiers on, with another big forum planned for this fall. In the meantime, school officials can and should get the Healthy Youth Survey into the hands of every parent on Bainbridge Island. Then it’s up to adults to ask themselves what they’re doing to change the underlying culture of permissiveness with drug and alcohol use by our young people.
Hard to know if anyone will take it seriously, though, when this week’s news was met with such a collective shrug.
