I remember how it was -- JR
Fentanyl Is Killing Our Students: Here’s How Students Are Fighting Back
Ten years ago, I had never heard the word “fentanyl.” Now, every sorority and fraternity on my college campus is equipped with Naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, a lifesaving medication used to treat opioid overdoses.
The fentanyl crisis is acutely felt on college campuses. Oftentimes, college students will take a pill that they thought was Xanax or Ritalin and end up dead.
According to federal data, the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45 is fentanyl overdose.
In the last three years alone, examples include three students at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill dying from fentanyl poisoning, and two students at Ohio State University died within a week of each other from fentanyl.
Having seen the horrors of fentanyl nationwide, and particularly in the state of Arizona (where more than five people a day die due to opioid overdoses, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services), students at the University of Arizona are leading the way in increasing access to Narcan, fentanyl test strips, and other overdose prevention measures.
On the University of Arizona’s campus, the presidents of 13 sororities and 18 fraternities have access to Narcan.
“As a chapter of over 425 members, 96 of which live in our chapter facility, it was crucial for us to have those options available,” Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority President Sasha Sanderson told me in an interview. “Having access to Narcan and fentanyl test strips in the house gives me peace of mind.”
The University of Arizona’s student-run emergency medical services team has increased access to Narcan on campus by providing a “Narcan locator” on the university website. The locator shows a map of the surrounding community and pins Narcan distribution sites. The website also provides information about Narcan training and distribution on campus.
The medical services team has collaborated with Greek-life organizations and is now turning its sights toward dormitory buildings to ensure more students have access to the lifesaving effects of Narcan.
“As with any safety issue, knowledge is important. We try and maximize the awareness of the dangers of opioids. The state of Arizona has a law which permits EMS/police agencies to leave behind prepackaged intranasal naloxone,” said the team’s public information officer, Tamra Ingersoll.
“We have worked with Greek Life, and as our partnership continues to evolve with Counter Narcotics Alliance (CNA), we will be working with Resident Life [on-campus housing] to ensure that Naloxone is available among the first aid items in student living areas,” she said.
Fentanyl is one of the most common drugs involved in overdose deaths because of its highly potent nature.
“Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Because the nature of a drug deal is illegal, drug dealers don’t have to provide ingredient lists, meaning that they can lace drugs with fentanyl unbeknownst to the user. Dealers are incentivized to use fentanyl as a filler because it is faster and cheaper to produce than other drugs.
It is nearly impossible to tell if a drug has been laced with fentanyl before use. And drug dealers will taint anything from counterfeit prescription medicines that they sell online to stronger substances like cocaine. It only takes 2 milligrams of fentanyl, which is the equivalent of about 10-15 grains of salt, to kill someone.
It’s crucial to understand that fentanyl deaths aren’t just affecting long-term drug users. They also affect college students who take a pill that they thought was safe and end up dead. College kids have always made mistakes, but nowadays, a mistake could cost them their lives.
While student-led efforts to prevent fentanyl overdoses are noble, experts suggest we would be better off stopping the flow of fentanyl into the country to begin with. That starts with sealing the border.
“Fentanyl is infiltrating our borders and killing our citizens. We must take both national and international action,” wrote Heritage Foundation legal expert Hans von Spakovsky.
Fentanyl is smuggled into the country through legal and illegal ports of entry, highlighting a serious security issue for the U.S.
In 2023, over 27,000 pounds of fentanyl were seized at legal ports of entry along the southern border. However, the majority of fentanyl is smuggled between ports of entry—meaning there is no way to know how much fentanyl is in the U.S.
In the same way the Biden administration could stop the flow of illegal migrants across the border, it could also stop much of the flow of fentanyl into the country.
Defending our border and stopping the flow of fentanyl is critical if we want to protect American college students.
I hope that in the next 10 years, we can return to a time when “fentanyl” wasn’t in my regular vocabulary.
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I Go to College in DC. Why Is It So Unsafe Here?
The words every parent dreads when a child goes off to college: “Mom, Dad. My school is on lockdown for an active shooter.” I’ve told my parents this twice now.
Violence has become a regular occurrence in my three years at The Catholic University of America, acronymized as CUA.
Last week, CUA issued a shelter-in-place order because a 14-year-old was shot and killed at the campus Metro station. The arrested suspect was 17.
A social studies teacher was mugged, shot, and killed on my campus last July. A large blood stain was left where he died for days afterward, a friend who was on campus at the time said.
CUA locked down last April because of a “swatting” scam. This is where a bad actor makes a fake 911 call claiming an active shooter was on campus. Thus, police SWAT teams are called and respond despite no actual threat.
I was in class at the time; classmates volunteered to sit in front of the doors to block them. I am grateful that it was a false alarm.
Last May, in the neighborhood adjacent to campus, a man confessed to killing and beheading a handyman.
In freshman year, I saw gang violence firsthand. Waiting for a Metro train at the campus station, I saw two men beating each other until one jumped on a train. The other’s face was dripping in blood from what seemed like a broken nose. He called someone on a cell phone and screamed about needing a ski mask so people wouldn’t recognize him.
The Catholic University of America sends alerts to the student body whenever a crime is reported in the area surrounding campus. To the credit of CUA, it updates students as much as possible. That said, I see that muggings, carjackings, shootings, and other violent crimes occur mere blocks away from my dorm almost weekly.
My school is in Washington, D.C. In a city with such strict gun laws, you would expect safer streets. You can’t open carry a firearm in the District of Columbia; the city requires universal background checks and bans “assault weapons.”
The elected government of the nation’s capital doesn’t support the “castle doctrine” of a person’s right to defend his own home. In D.C., there is a “duty to retreat.”
If the city’s gun laws are working, how is it that I have had to hide twice because of active shooters?
Crime in the District has been on the rise. I wrote about it last year for my school newspaper. Violent crime jumped 23% from February 2022 to February 2023. Assaults, muggings, and carjackings have gone up.
The increase in carjackings last year prompted D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, to give out steering-wheel locks.
Leftist billionaire financier George Soros is known for trying to transform America’s criminal justice system by contributing big money to the campaigns of soft-on-crime candidates for district attorney across the country. Once elected, these liberal DAs have trumped the efforts of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
However, such efforts come at a serious cost to students like me. Our safety is the price for their progressive policies.
Violent criminals across the country are receiving reduced sentences if convicted or aren’t being charged at all.
Recently it was discovered that major cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles failed to submit crime data to the FBI.
An op-ed published in the Washington Examiner and co-written by former Assistant FBI Director Mark Morgan contends that the FBI erred in counting violent crimes: The bureau claims that crime in major cities has gone down, when in fact it has gone up over the past five years. (Morgan, acting chief of U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the Trump administration, is now a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, parent organization of The Daily Signal.)
An organization cited in the op-ed, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which collects police data, says homicides in major cities have gone up 23%. The Council on Criminal Justice, a similar organization, estimates that homicide is up 18% and violent crime in general is up 8%.
Matthew Graves, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, also serves as the local prosecutor in the nation’s capital. An appointee of President Joe Biden, Graves is embroiled in a case stemming from the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, that has caused scandal and division throughout the country.
Am I supposed to trust that Graves will be tough on crime when it opposes his woke ideals? Am I supposed to trust that he will keep me safe?
Right now, thousands of parents are preparing their children for college, buying mattress toppers, laptops, and red solo cups. However, the reality is that many students, especially females, also will purchase personal alarms and pepper spray.
Why is this our reality? It is mostly our own fault.
We choose our leaders. The government enforces the law only through the consent of the governed. This is good news, though; the political reality is in our hands. We need to call out lawmakers who are soft on crime, take civic action, and stop sitting passively while students of any age are forced to face the underbelly of our nation’s cities.
Only when we stand up against the woke mob will our cities become safer.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/12/i-go-to-college-in-dc-why-is-it-so-unsafe-here/
********************************************Education hiring continues regardless of the number of students
New data for the 2022-2023 academic year paints a disturbing picture. While students are slowly trickling back into public schools post-COVID-19, the same cannot be said for staffing. The National Center for Education Statistics revealed an increase of 173,000 students in public schools, yet during the same period, a staggering 159,000 employees were hired, including 15,000 additional teachers.
Researcher Chad Aldeman provides specific examples of hiring trends in various districts across the country. He explains that about one-third of these districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For instance, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1.
About a quarter of all districts followed the path of California’s Capistrano Unified School District, which lowered its teaching force over time, but not as fast as it lost students. Capistrano suffered a 22% decline in student enrollment but reduced its teaching staff by just 7%.
Another group of districts grew student enrollments, but their teacher count has risen even faster. The Katy Independent School District, near Houston, added 4,299 students last year, a gain of 4.9%. At the same time, it hired 366 teachers, a 6% gain. Over the period, its student body increased by 22% while its teacher count grew by 29%.
But as Aldeman notes, the future is murky, “As districts spend down the last of their federal ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief ) dollars, they may have to lay off staff or close under-enrolled buildings.”
If teachers must be laid off, the typical union contract stipulates that it must be done by seniority or the “last in, first out” (LIFO) regimen. This industrial style of dealing with a teacher overage is typified by Michigan’s Ann Arbor Public Schools system, where the teacher union contract states that after considering years of experience with the district, if two teachers have equal seniority,the last several digits of a teacher’s Social Security number would be the tiebreaker for a layoff.
Also, a study from Stanford U. found that only 13% to 16% of the teachers laid off in a seniority-based system would also be cut under a system based on teacher effectiveness.
Then, there is the problem of “under-enrolled” schools, for which Chicago is the poster child. At this time, one-third of Chicago’s 473 public schools (CPS) are at less than 50% capacity. Considering that just 20% of 3rd through 8th graders in the Windy City are proficient in reading and only 15% are proficient in math, this is hardly surprising. Also, in 30 Chicago public schools, no student can read at grade level.
Egregiously, the city’s Douglass High School, with only 34 students enrolled, is slated to receive $34 million for renovations.
Why not have these kids go somewhere else? As Ted Dabrowski of Wirepoints maintains, “Already families have abandoned these schools. The question for CPS is, ‘Why are you keeping empty, failing schools open?’ Shut them and use the money elsewhere or give the money back to the taxpayers.”
It’s noteworthy that if one is an equity-driven fanatic, anti-shutdown doggedness does not apply to all schools.
https://heartland.org/opinion/featherbed-ed/
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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