Attention has been focused on the closed-campus issue as one initiative to tamp down drug and alcohol abuse among teens at Oak Park and River Forest High School. To its credit, the school board last week took a first step toward closing the campus. Now we strongly urge them to follow through and fully implement the closing. Half steps would miss the point.
More on that later.
While we have advocated for the closed campus, our view has always been strong that it is but one step in a complex series of efforts to battle drug and alcohol use at the school. So while the school is moving forward on that front, it is potentially fumbling an opportunity to retain the services of its lead — indeed its only — drug counselor, Margo Bristow.
Find us a person who is not an enthusiastic fan of Bristow’s hands-on interventions with our kids as they stumble or slide into drug and/or alcohol abuse. Bristow arrived at the school seven years ago as part of an innovative alliance between OPRF and Thrive Counseling Center, a local nonprofit. Now when the need is great and the focus on the issue finally sharpening, Bristow plans to leave to move into a private practice that is more likely to fund a reasonable retirement. She doesn’t want to go. But $34,000, her annual salary via Thrive, isn’t adequate.
It is now late May and the school hasn’t acted either to retain Bristow through some mechanism, or to announce its plans for drug counseling services for next school year. The reality is that OPRF needs an expanded program and needs to integrate it fully into the school’s counseling services.
Where is that plan?
Yes, we’d strongly urge the school to keep Bristow, her intimate knowledge of students in trouble, her plainspoken approach and her many connections to finding these kids help. We’d like to see Thrive, with its long history of mental health counseling, remain an active partner. But mostly we want to see an aggressive plan to deal with this aspect of the drug and alcohol abuse problem.
Clearly this school has the money. This is a worthy place to invest it.
Returning to closed campus, we issue this caution. The “earned privilege” model that would potentially allow some seniors, maybe juniors as well, to leave campus midday is rife with problems. One is logistical. The school can’t enforce its pretty-simple-closed-campus-for-freshman model even now. How it would sort out a model where some older students earn their way to Tasty Dog seems impossible.
More critically, the earned privilege concept suggests that good grades or stellar attendance equates to being drug and alcohol free. It does not. The abuse problem grabs hold of all manner of student. To think otherwise is naïve. This is not the moment for this school board to be naïve.