Harmony Academy in Lake Oswego will help students stay clean and sober together
On Sept. 3, Harmony Academy will open its doors to any high school student in recovery from drug and alcohol abuse in Portland’s tri-county area.
Enrollment at Oregon’s first recovery high school will remain open throughout the year, with no cap on the number of students who will be accepted, although administrators expect a class of about 28 during the first year of operation. If more enroll, administrators are “prepared to be nimble,” said Tony Mann, who is president of the school’s board and of Oregon Recovery High School Initiative, which jump-started the project.
Harmony Academy Principal Sharon Dursi Martin said she envisions her student body eventually growing to about 80. Dursi Martin moved up from Eugene to take the job. There, she worked at a charter school and an alternative high school before obtaining a degree in education administration from the University of Oregon.
Dursi Martin, who has been in recovery herself for nearly 14 years, said that in her career as an educator, she’s focused her energy on working with at-risk youths, drawing from her own experiences to guide them and making sure they know how to get the help they need.
“These aren’t bad kids that are learning how to be good,” Dursi Martin said. “These are kids struggling with addiction who are learning how to be healthy.”
Harmony Academy will operate as a public charter school within the Lake Oswego School District. It’s on the first floor of the historic Christie School building just off Highway 43. On a mission from Canada, the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, on a mission from Canada, originally built the school as an orphanage for girls in 1908. The sisters instructed that the building be used only to serve disadvantaged youths throughout its existence.
Today, it houses the regional headquarters for Youth Villages Oregon. The first floor, however, has been vacant.
For Lake Oswego School District’s superintendent, Lora de la Cruz, the academy’s opening is personal.
“I have a nephew who struggled with opioid addiction throughout high school, and the devastating outcome of that was he died of an overdose at age 20,” she said during a sneak peek of the school two weeks before classes were slated to begin. “Our students are coming to us with greater needs – I would say unprecedented levels of need – in terms of mental health and addiction support needed, so how incredible is it that we can offer this support to our students.”
Harmony Academy will serve students in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties, with the school’s daily operations supported by the state funding attached to each student in Oregon.
It’s open to students who are committed to their recovery and who voluntarily choose to attend. A grant from Oregon Health Authority and sponsorships from Kaiser Permanente, CareOregon, The Alano Club of Portland and Clackamas County Behavioral Health helped get the doors open. Kaiser Permanente’s director of addiction medicine, Paul Bryant, who also sits on the school’s board, said Kaiser’s support of the school will be ongoing.
“Volunteer spirit and elbow grease has gone into creating what you see,” said Mann, the school’s board president.
The school will use two classrooms, a large multipurpose room, a hallway filled with lockers and an unconventional principal’s office for its first year, all of which have been updated to fit the school’s needs. In addition to the principal, there will be one classroom teacher and an assistant, as well as a recovery coach, who will help students navigate their recovery plans and provide support if students fail random, mandatory urinalysis drug tests.
As more students enroll, additional rooms can be remodeled and used as classrooms and additional teachers will be hired. However, once the student body reaches about 50, Dursi Martin said, the school will likely have to find a new location.
The school is the result of efforts to find a way to change the trajectory for Oregon kids with addiction issues.
“When you look at the instance of addiction and adolescents’ recovery, access to robust supports, Oregon’s really at the bottom of the 50 states in the country,” Mann said.
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Now, three years after those discussions began, this high school is set to serve as the exemplar for other jurisdictions. The Oregon Recovery High School Initiative will partner with any locality interested in opening a recovery high school of its own. Mann said Oregon could see a second such school as soon as 2021, but there are no concrete plans for additional locations at this time.
Mann, a parent who’s worked as a superintendent in Clackamas County, said he’s heard directly from students who say that if they go back to their old neighborhood high school after treatment, the deck is stacked against them.
“Your heart breaks in those situations,” he said.
For teens in recovery from drug and alcohol abuse, returning to the same school after treatment can quickly lead to relapse – within the first six months – up to 70% of the time.
While research on the effectiveness of recovery high schools is still inconclusive, several studies suggest the opposite happens when students enroll in a recovery high school instead of returning to their old stomping grounds.
Recovery high school students, for example, were found to be significantly more likely than non-recovery high school students to report complete abstinence from alcohol and drugs after six months, according to a 2017 study published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
Recovery high schools don’t admit students who are not personally committed to maintaining their sobriety.
The first recovery high school was founded in Maryland in 1979, and with the addition of Harmony Academy, there are about 40 such schools spread across 16 states today, according to listings with The Association of Recovery Schools.
Parents and high school students interested in learning more, scheduling a tour or enrolling in Harmony Academy can visit the school’s website.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
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