LILBURN, Ga. — Berkmar High School Principal Durrant Williams can't stop the drug crisis, but he can prepare for it.
"We know some of our kids have real drug issues," he said. "We want to help support them, but at the same time, make sure that we enlighten everybody on campus around the challenges that we are having with drugs in our communities."
Three students have overdosed at Berkmar High in three separate incidents involving fentanyl this fall, according to Williams. All of them survived.
"All three students were connected in some way, shape or form," Williams said. "We felt like they were friends, and they were dealing with the same person, whoever was distributing outside of campus, and it made its way on our campus."
He said all Gwinnett County School administrators were trained on and given Naloxone after the first incident of the year. The training will be optional for any educators who are interested in learning too.
"Drugs have been in school since we were all tots and even before we were tots," he said. "Seeing it at the level that it is now because of the type of drug is the scary part. "
Dr. Audrey Arona, CEO and Chief Medical Officer of GNR Public Health, said there is an uptick in students overdosing across the country.
She said roughly 15% of high school students admit to using illicit drugs; roughly 14% say they misuse prescription opioids.
"If you consider that a lot of those are being laced, those are your overdoses right there," Dr. Arona said. "What we're trying to educate our students and families about is that this fentanyl crisis is here. It is in our backyards. It's a community problem that has infiltrated into our schools."
She said the health department is partnering with the school district to educate and prepare for these situations.
"By increasing the training and having more availability of [Naloxone] actually on school campuses, that's one way that we're working with the schools to try to help with this problem," she said. "It's really important to increase awareness and education that we're in a place in our country where it's very, very dangerous to use drugs right now."
Students struggling with addiction can be connected with a number of resources. School social workers like Jose David Vargas make sure they find the right help.
"Usually, when it comes to drug use or any other thing, these what we would consider maladaptive, which means they are using these to get away from whatever might be stressing them," Vargas said. "I try to break it down from home or school. And from there... I bridge them through solutions from outside of school, inside of the school to kind of settle both."
He said the main concern he's noticed is that they're scared of judgment.
"The larger community has a bigger social impact on them than you would believe," he said. "We want them to be able to operate on their own and move forward at all levels of school."