Anchorage schools change safety protocols after 2 steady years of drug overdoses

Anchorage schools have seen enough drug overdoses in recent years that district officials are instituting trainings and stocking supplies to deal with the problem.

Doses of naloxone, a medication that rapidly halts an opioid overdose, are spread throughout Anchorage School District facilities beside the defibrillator boxes. Principals and nurses undergo training to spot symptoms and administer Narcan, the easy-to-use nasal spray version of naloxone that’s become increasingly common in public life over the last several years.

Driving the problem is fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid that has eclipsed heroin and pharmaceutical painkillers in Alaska’s drug supply. Fentanyl is often the active ingredient in counterfeit pills sold hand-to-hand or over social media, and is also added to lace other illicit substances. After a cluster of suspected opioid overdoses in the 2022-23 academic year, health officials with the Anchorage School District stepped up efforts to keep students alive. And now those measures are as standardized within ASD as other public health protocols like CPR or EpiPens.

“I would say it has slowed down a little bit since the beginning of school year,” said Kersten Johnson-Struempler, the district’s deputy chief of schools. “But you just never know what’s in our community at any given time. And usually what we see, with fentanyl in particular, is spikes of overdoses in certain amounts of time, which means something’s being distributed in our community at that time.”

So far this school year, there have been two incidents where students were suspected to have overdosed on an opioid. They occurred back to back in mid-September, and both survived. Last academic year there were 14 such non-fatal instances, though that figure includes non-students, too, such as staff. In one case, a parent was discovered unconscious in a vehicle outside their children’s elementary school, according to Kathy Bell, the head of health care services for the district.

However, there is no mechanism for school officials to officially code an incident as definitively involving fentanyl or other opioids. Typically what happens is someone on school property spots a person with the worrisome symptoms of a potentially fatal overdose: lack of responsiveness, unconsciousness, shallow breathing, possibly even discoloration of the flesh from a lack of oxygen. The person might then be brought to a school nurse, or dosed on the spot with Narcan, in which case 911 is called and emergency responders bring the person a hospital. After they are off school grounds, Johnson-Struempler said, there is no mandatory protocol for follow-up to find out what happened or what drug might have been in their system.

“Often times the overdoses happen at the school, but once they go to the hospital we’re relying on parents to communicate back with us if it was an overdose,” she said. “So we don’t have great numbers.”

The closest thing to an official record is a document Bell keeps recording all the 911 calls placed by schools, noting when the suspected cause was a drug overdose.

“I will say, we haven’t had a student overdose and die in school during the school day,” Johnson-Struempler said.

Bell is currently working to outfit every high school in the district with three mounted red box with 12 doses of Narcan each, two such boxes for every middle school and one for each elementary school. In 2022, when administrators first grew alarmed by the problem, they conducted a training for all of the district’s principals and nurses. This year, they held another such training, both as a refresher and to make sure that new educators were up to speed. Some school nurses, Bell said, have also given Narcan kits to security guards to carry.

There is also a greater degree of awareness about the issue within the ASD community at large, according to both Bell and Johnson-Struempler. Worried reports about suspected overdoses have come not just from officials who have undergone trainings, but from all quarters.

“There are teachers that spot it and intervene, there are principals, security (guards), there’s definitely friends who are worried about their friends that report it, as well,” Johnson-Struempler said. “That’s really what we want our kids to do if you’re worried about someone. We’re not worried about them getting in trouble at that point, we want to make sure they’re alive and well.”

The overdoses are not confined to any one school or subgroup, but, like the opioid epidemic more broadly, spread all over the district, she explained.

“We’re seeing kids all across the secondary schools. It doesn’t even have like a neighborhood region kind of pattern. It’s all over the place,” Johnson-Struempler said. “We had seen kids at almost every comprehensive high school across the city ... all over town. Economics didn’t play into it, types of student didn’t play into it. It was everywhere from freshman to senior.”

Schools, she said, are a part of the wider society. So when there’s a broad social crisis, such as fentanyl, it inevitably shows up inside of Anchorage’s schools.

“It’s a community issue, and we’re working through it just like everyone else, too,” Johnson-Struempler said.