Do you think Recovery High Schools are a great idea?

BEVERLY, Massachusetts (CNN) — It was Halloween night when 12-year-old Lucy Gross picked up her first marijuana cigarette, starting a spiral from which she is still struggling to recover. By the time she was 15, the Gloucester, Massachusetts, teen was drinking, using cocaine and taking a variety of other pills, including Vicodin and Oxycontin. Her parents were worried. Even she knew she needed help.

By high school, she had a diagnosis of depression and was suffering from anxiety. Lucy spent a month in treatment at a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, then six more months at a residential facility in Maine for troubled teens. Her parents’ biggest worry was what would happen when Lucy had to go back to her old school.

"For kids who are susceptible to go back into that environment and to stay clean and sober, it’s just got to be incredibly difficult," said Lucy’s mother, Abbie Lundberg. "I don’t know how they do it."

Luckily, Lucy didn’t have to. Northshore Recovery High School opened its doors three years ago in Beverly, Massachusetts, a 20-minute ride from Gloucester. The school is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the local school districts. The goal: provide high school students a safe, drug-free environment where they can finish their education.

Recovery high, the real gift that it gives to the kids is the soft landing when they come out of rehab or a longer-term facility like Lucy was in," said Tony Gross, Lucy’s father. "It just allows them to reintegrate at their own pace, gently."

It’s a traditional curriculum with a twist: a 12-step model program designed to prevent relapse. There are group sessions every day so kids can talk about any issues, problems or progress they’re making. When they graduate, students receive a state-certified diploma
Michaela Gile teaches English at Northshore. "It’s incredibly difficult in one sense and it’s also incredibly rewarding, because you deal with students whose emotions are very raw. There are certain things some kids can’t do on a given day because it’s too hard. Life gets too hard sometimes to, say, sit down and write an essay. So you have to make allowances for that."

While Northshore is relatively new, recovery high schools are not. The first one, Sobriety High, opened its doors in 1987 in Edina, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis. Judy Hanson was there almost from the beginning. As a licensed alcohol and drug counselor at treatment centers in the area, she acted as an adviser to Sobriety High’s founder.

"I would be so tired of seeing students that I transitioned from the treatment center to their former high school fail within the first month. You tell these kids to go back to high school and tell them to not see their old using friends and build a new network of friends, and it’s so hard."

I don’t base my success on relapse," Northside’s Lipinski said. "I base my success on these children willing to come back and make a go of it again. I mean, you don’t find many dropouts from a high school coming back and asking for a second chance."Hanson agrees. "Our graduation rates are usually above 90 percent," she said, "Higher than most public schools."

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/13/addiction.recovery.school.teens/index.html?iref=werecommend

These school would not be needed if parents taught their children self control to begin with. Here’s an idea….make all high schools "drug free zones"….I know it’s a new concept and all but I bet it would work!

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