Preventing Overdose Deaths in Schools

This week, The Baltimore Sun reported that nurses’ offices are beginning to stock naloxone in some Baltimore area schools. With a rise in heroin deaths across Maryland – The Baltimore Sun reported 1,089 people died in 2015 of opioid-related overdoes – school nurses are just the latest to join police officers, family members and emergency health workers who’ve already received training to use the drug.

With the start of this school year, both Baltimore County and Carroll County schools stock naloxone and have trained school nurses and police officers in how to use the drug in case of an overdose in the school. They join Anne Arundel County schools, who began stocking the drug early this year.

Naxolone prevents overdose deaths by any opioid-related drugs, including heroin and fentanyl. The Baltimore Sun reported that 35,000 people who are not health professionals have been trained in administering the drug since 2014. And of those 35,000 people, they have had to administer the drug 1,181 times.

The drug can be purchased over the counter in Maryland by trained individuals, many are family members of people who suffer from addiction. For schools, they can get a stock of it in much the same way they would receive stock of Epi-Pens, through school or health department budgets.  

Now Baltimore City schools and Howard County schools are hoping to follow suit. In Baltimore City, the Sun reports that the Health Department is preparing a naloxone policy to present to school officials, and with Baltimore’s Health Commissioner, Leana Wen, it seems like she won’t give up on the policy easily.

Wen has taken a passionate lead in revamping the way people think about addiction and overdose deaths – pointing out that people do not feel with any other disease that it is acceptable to pass blame on to the person with the disease, or expect that person to stop treatment after a certain period of time.

While the Sun doesn’t provided figures of how many students have overdosed in area schools, it did report that naloxone was used in an Anne Arundel County school on a student. But it seems counter-productive to wait until there is a problem of overdosing in school to stock the drug, as schools do not wait for students to have allergic reactions to be able to hold a supply of Epi-Pens. Naloxone is a preventative drug, and could be the first step to ensure any student suffering from addiction is alive and able to get the treatment necessary to be able to heal. 

Links: 

• The Baltimore Sun - http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/education/bs-md-narcan-schools-20161102-story.html
• Baltimore City Paper - http://www.citypaper.com/news/features/bcp-110216-feature-leana-wen-20161102-story.html

Helping Struggling Students

            I agree with Kirp's thesis in "Nudges That Help Struggling Students Succeed" that changing mind-sets before attending college is a huge part of the quality education students need. Kirp explains that even brief experiences of growth mind-set intervention equates to a powerful and long-lasting impact on students' academic futures. Examples include writing effective feedback with strategic constructive criticism to work towards higher expectations. Studies show black and Latino students benefitting from growth mind-set the most when thinking of how to close the achievement gap. By helping students realize their intelligence can grow through deliberate work, teachers are nudging their students towards a growth mind-set. Other strategies include asking students to find the value in their lives. This activity invites students to combat racial stereotypes and acknowledge their self-worth.
            These strategies help students refocus on their positive aspects of their lives and their goals (immediate and future). Kirp expresses it the best. These strategies combat students' negative feelings. With these strategies, students learn to be resilient and prepares them for life struggles.
I use these strategies in my classroom because it's hard to convince a black inner-city student that they will be able to speak French for at least one minute within eight months. I don't have authentic resources of recognizable black Americans speaking French. Growth mind-set is built into my lessons through the objectives. I incorporate "can-do" statements and then revolve the lesson around that objective to help students realize that with hard work, they can meet this objective.


Here's the link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/opinion/nudges-that-help-struggling-students-succeed.html 

Increasing the Quality of Teacher Education Programs

In the United States, when we think about the professions that are considered highly competitive and requiring the most training we think of doctors, lawyers and engineers. The teaching profession does not make this list. While teachers have one of the most important jobs—educating children to become successful and productive members of society—the programs that prepare them lack rigor and high standards for enrollment. As a result, teachers are increasingly unprepared to effectively educate their students when they get to the classroom. In a recent New York Times article “Train Teachers Like Doctors” Polakaow- Suransky, Thomases and Demoss pointed out that the United States is facing a shortages of teachers due to high turnover rates and low enrollment in teacher training programs. The response to this issue was to lower the standards for new teachers making it easier to become a teacher. There are now programs that allow people to become teachers with little to no training, and usually these teachers are assigned high poverty areas. When teachers are faced with educating students under the most challenging circumstances and with insufficient preparation, it is not surprising that the burn-out rates are so high.

By not investing in high quality teacher education programs, we are setting teachers up for failure. I remember when I was attending my teacher education program, I had a professor who told us very matter-of-factly that no one was a good teacher their first year.  He was trying to make a point about the importance of experience in becoming a highly effective teacher, and he was right in the sense that there are some things about teaching that you learn best through experience. However, I do believe there is a certain amount of instruction and hands on training that is required in order for new teachers to manage a classroom and implement effective teaching practices. While first year teachers may not be highly effective, they should not be failing to educate their students. It is essential that new teachers start their careers with enough training to keep them from burning out before they gain the experience that makes the highly effective. There are so many teachers who have the potential to be highly effective but because they lack minimum training necessary, they burn-out and leave the profession before they reach that potential. This results in high teacher turnover rates especially in low income areas that need have the greatest need for stability and experienced teachers. It is completely counterintuitive that the most inexperienced and underqualified teachers are teaching in schools that have the greatest need for high quality education. This is yet another example an injustice suffered by high poverty populations.

The article highlighted several teacher education programs that are models of effective teacher preparation. The teacher education programs that produced teachers who stayed in their profession and demonstrated high student achievement rates all required lengthy co-teaching residencies. These “residencies” are different than that of traditional student teaching in that they are yearlong and provide more opportunities to take on all the responsibilities of teaching. In many of the fast-tracked teacher education programs the student teaching is brief and limited to observing veteran teachers and teaching short supervised lessons. In order to prepare teachers to meet the needs of our students and provide them with a high quality education, we must raise the standards for teacher preparation programs so that they are on par with those of doctors and lawyers.

 Link to New York Times Article http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/opinion/train-teachers-like-doctors.html