How New Bedford’s schools intervene when students struggle with drugs and alcohol

NEW BEDFORD — Earlier this year a student at Normandin Middle School walked into a small room beside the library. She was nervous, but settled into a cozy bean bag chair next to shelves of art supplies, board games, and snacks meant to make pre-teens feel at ease.

But something wasn’t quite right.

After a few minutes, Noemi Acevedo, the “success coach” who was trying to break through to her, asked: “Sweetie, are you high right now?”

Visibly upset, the middle schooler looked up at Acevedo: “Are you going to tell my mom?”

The children and schools of New Bedford have become entangled in the addiction crisis that is plaguing the city. Simply attending school in New Bedford qualifies a student as “at risk” of substance use, local counselors say, owing to the swirling factors of high poverty, drug accessibility, and rates of drug use in the community.

“All kids are going to be exposed” to some sort of substance in New Bedford, said Caitlin Vest, the director of the ASPIRE program, a drug prevention and response initiative now launched in all three middle schools. “Even normal developmental milestones have stress, but there’s an ease of access to substances.” Vest said that can lead any young person to replace healthy coping strategies with nicotine, alcohol, and marijuana — the three most common substances around schools today.

At Normandin, the young girl who came into the ASPIRE program said she didn’t even enjoy being high. She arrived at her appointment scared and looking for help. Shifting on the bean bag, she admitted to smoking marijuana, but couldn’t answer when Acevedo asked why she had started, or why she had gone back to it.

“Brains are not fully developed” in children, explained Vest, whose ASPIRE program is run by Child & Family Services, the New Bedford-based nonprofit. “Marijuana can replace the natural joys of relationships and accomplishments … and it impairs the part of your brain that responds to pleasure and reward.”

In short, young people can substitute the natural reward and stress mechanisms in their still-growing brains with the sensation of being high. For the young girl at Normandin, that meant she had trouble processing emotions without the substance.

Impairment at an early age can affect overall development — including brain development and performance in school — but it especially supercharges the risk factor for more severe addiction as an adult. “The earlier people start using substances, the higher their risk is,” said Vest. 

Solving the addiction crisis in New Bedford, experts say, will require intervening before much of the next generation becomes dependent on substances.

What’s it like in schools today?

Across town at Keith Middle School, the ASPIRE program has a waiting list. Annalisa Pires, one of the success coaches here, currently serves about 25 students. A handful of these kids have shared that they’re using substances — mostly nicotine, but some marijuana. Almost a dozen more have a family history of addiction, or see someone using drugs at home.

“All the kids are at risk — especially in this neighborhood,” Pires said. Meanwhile, her waiting list has 10 more names and is growing.

One student Pires works with, another middle-school-aged girl, was using a nicotine vape and occasionally smoking marijuana. “She told me that once the high wears off, all the same feelings come back,” Pires said. “She came to the realization by herself that it’s not changing anything.”

So together, Pires and the student worked on a plan. They targeted the feelings and situations that led the girl to turn to substances. Then they came up with alternative de-stressors, like breathing techniques or turning on music. Finally, they agreed that she would reduce her use until she could cut it altogether.

During a recent check-in, the girl gave Pires an update. Before school her phone had buzzed — some friends were going to smoke by a nearby corner store, getting high before class. Did she want to come, they asked?

This was normal for her. These were her friends. They wanted to see her.

“She said no and stuck to our plan,” Pires said. “It shows that what we say to them is getting absorbed, and that all the info they’re usually getting is from people who are using or on social media.”

Many risk factors that can lead people to misuse substances (as listed by SAMHSA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) are common in the New Bedford area.

Councilors with ASPIRE say they can automatically check off three major risk factors of substance misuse for every New Bedford student: neighborhood poverty, accessibility to drugs, and community drug use.

Rates of overdoses and emergency room visits show how common the substances are. People in New Bedford die of overdoses at a 142% higher rate than other Massachusetts residents, according to state Department of Public Health statistics; they have a 79% higher rate of emergency room visits related to substance use; and they have a 211% higher rate of admission to substance treatment centers.  

Other risk factors are common in New Bedford, too. 

People who have different cultural upbringings than their parents, such as second-generation immigrants, are at risk, according to local councilors. In New Bedford, almost half of students use a different language at home.  

Meanwhile, in-school indicators like poor academic performance and frequently missing school are also risk factors. The Light has previously reported on chronic absenteeism in New Bedford that contributes to low academic performance. Though attendance is starting to recover from post-pandemic lows, academic performance continues to falter — New Bedford High has some of the lowest math and English scores across the state. And the high school plus all three middle schools are classified as “requiring assistance or intervention” by the state department of education.

Another risk factor, homelessness, affects every school in New Bedford, The Light has reported. 

This concentration of risk factors in New Bedford, coupled with relative ease of access to substances, has led to the proliferation of misuse.

“There’s so many vapes. You can see them thrown all around,” said Pires, the success coach at Keith.

By the time a New Bedford student reaches high school, vaping has become almost normal. A 2019 survey found that 27% of New Bedford High students vape.

In response, the school has severely limited when students can use the restroom — even closing many bathrooms completely — because students were congregating there to vape. Teachers have also been asked to spend their planning periods monitoring the restrooms, and vape detectors have been installed above the stalls.

That means every teacher and student — even those who have never vaped — are finding large parts of their daily lives and overall school experience shaped by these substances.

Outside the school doors

Not all young people are in school. At 16 years old, Alfredo worked in the fish houses.

His job was a packer. After the boats came in and the tons upon tons of seafood — redfish, haddock, and snapper — were cleaned and sliced into portions, Alfredo would wrap the chunks in plastic and attach a label. Like many in the New Bedford fish houses, he was an immigrant — a Guatemalan who spoke K’iche, the indigenous Mayan language that’s heard across New Bedford.

But on New Year’s Day 2022, Alfredo passed away from a fentanyl overdose. He was declared dead at 6 a.m., just before the first sunrise of the new year. He had not yet reached his 17th birthday.

Overdose deaths are not common among youth in New Bedford. Since 2015, only three people younger than 20 have died of an overdose, all due to fentanyl. But as the deadly synthetic opioid has become a larger part of the drug crisis in New Bedford — and especially among immigrants and the fishing community — young people have felt its effects, too.

Rates of newborns affected by opioids — similar to the rate of overdoses — are more severe on the South Coast: “It is clear that the opioid crisis is impacting newborns in Southeast Massachusetts at a greater rate than elsewhere in the state,” read the city’s community health needs assessment, which Southcoast Health published in 2022.

Southcoast Health diagnosed 3.6% of all babies born in its system with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) in 2021 — which affects newborns who suffer after narcotics exposure in the womb. That number has been declining in recent years, but Southeastern Massachusetts still has more infants diagnosed with NAS than any other region, according to a statewide dashboard.

Other out-of-school circumstances pose high risks to young people too. While very few middle-schoolers say they have ever drunk alcohol, 10% report having recently ridden in a car driven by someone who drank, according to the most recent Mass Youth Health Survey. Perhaps more troubling, 5% of Massachusetts high-schoolers say they have recently driven a car themselves after consuming alcohol.

Underpinning almost all of the substance use issues is young people’s mental health. About one of every three New Bedford students said in a 2019 survey that they had felt so sad or hopeless for at least two weeks in a row that they stopped doing usual activities.

Across Massachusetts, one in eight middle-schoolers said they have seriously considered suicide. For high-schoolers it’s a slightly higher rate, at one in seven. While the exact causes can be complex, prolonged stress, trauma, and access to drugs are among the chief causes that can lead to suicidal ideation in children and teens.

A difficult problem with an easy solution

The basic formula for misusing substances is simple: kids are stressed, often deeply so, and in New Bedford there is easier access to nicotine and marijuana. Using these substances to cope with stress makes kids more likely to suffer worse health outcomes or to enter the grip of opioids later in life.

The ASPIRE program, which is planning to expand to other schools across the city, is helping kids make social connections, which can greatly improve their mental health and help them avoid substances.

“The biggest thing is their anxiety. A lot of kids don’t know how to talk to each other,” said Pires, the success coach at Keith.

The majority of students who interact with Pires and the other success coaches signed up or were referred for help with simple social skills. They need guidance on how to navigate these notoriously stressful years that now include increased pressures to use substances.

Three factors can reduce the risk of substance use: doing volunteer work, participating in an organized activity, and sitting down to dinner with family, according to the Massachusetts Department of Health. These simple acts of connection lead young people to use substances at lower rates, the agency said.

For the ASPIRE success coaches, too, connection with students is the antidote. Acevedo, the coach at Normandin, said: “I’ve seen a high need for someone who can relate to them and empower them.” 

So the coaches use these basic interventions. They organize simple activities, like yoga in the mornings or an after-school club for haircare. During breaks and in the summers, they take kids to amusement parks and museums. And last month they invited families to a community dinner, during which they discussed tobacco use in school. 

Acevedo said she hopes to act as “a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org

---