An amended version of House Bill 367 requiring school districts to teach about prescription opioid abuse cleared the Ohio General Assembly and became law last week with Gov. John Kasich’s signature. The new rules require the Governor’s Cabinet Opiate Action Team to make new curricula recommendations on or before July 1, 2015 to the Ohio Department of Education.
Some districts, including Springfield City Schools, are already required to teach about illicit drugs in some fashion. While details of the additional instructional mandate have yet to emerge, the new law is a recognition that students are potentially at risk of being touched by heroin at ever younger ages, said Superintendent David Estrop.
“The more we can help our students, our young people, understand the dangers of some of the things that they may be experimenting with, or have thought about experimenting with, the better, particularly given the heroin epidemic that’s sweeping many communities,” Estrop said. “This seems to be yet another step forward to try to make sure young people in particular understand that there are dangers.”
Many of the new law’s components could be based on Start Talking, an effort underway to curb adolescent drug abuse, said Philip Atkins, coordinator of the state program.
The year-old Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services program provided the Legislature with a roadmap for the new legislation, Atkins said. He said the program strives to unite students, their parents and schools in an effort to promote good decision making and healthy behaviors when it comes to use of pain medication, he said.
The program has already given the state a head start with the new law, said Atkins, who works closely with Andrea Boxill, the new director of the Governor’s Cabinet Opiate Action Team.
“In essence … in the last year we’ve had little pilot-laboratories around the state testing some of these curricula and giving us feedback so that we have a learning environment so that now that legislation is in place we can hit the ground running,” Atkins said.
The program got off the ground with about $1.4 million in state aid to set up 22 projects in 22 pilot communities across the state, including Butler County. Many school administrators, educators, counselors, nurses and officials from local agencies and county alcohol, drug and mental health boards, will ultimately have input while the final guidelines are developed, Atkins said.
School districts already are required to teach about the nutritional value of food and the harmful effects of illicit drugs, as well as alcohol and tobacco abuse along with venereal disease education. In grades kindergarten through six, students currently receive instruction about personal safety and assault prevention. Between grades seven and 12, they learn about dating violence prevention.
The bill’s primary sponsors, Rep. Denise Driehaus, D-Cincinnati, and Rep. Robert Sprague, R-Findlay, traveled the state last summer hearing from Ohioans as members of the Prescription Drug Addiction and Healthcare Reform Study Committee.
“Most people don’t realize that prescription opioids and heroin are close cousins, and heroin use is simply a later phase of the same addiction,” the two wrote in their Senate sponsor testimony.
“Some students may have already been exposed to these kinds of drugs after a sports injury or surgery, and requiring school districts to incorporate this type of curriculum into health classes may be the only exposure to opioid education and abuse prevention that some students ever receive,” Driehaus and Sprague wrote.
An Ohio Legislative Service Commission fiscal analysis of the bill reports the cost to implement the new instruction “should not be significant.”
“We certainly don’t want to put an excessive burden on an already overburdened school system,” Atkins said. “The good news is many if not most of school districts are already working on this with their kids.”
It’s also unknown how early in a student’s school career the the prescription opioid instruction will be taught, or how it will be incorporated into any grade level’s schoolwork until the Governor’s Cabinet Opiate Action Team makes its recommendation’s, Atkins said.
It’s possible the subject could be taught in multiple disciplines whether assigned as an English paper, a history lesson about addiction in America, or as a social studies project, Atkins said.
“One of the things we’d like to do is make sure that drug prevention information is used across the curricula,” he said. “We can infuse it across the curricula.”
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