Making the Grade, Clean and Sober

It isn’t true, Sally told the principal. I don’t care what you think. You’re wrong.

This wasn’t the first time Sally had been called to the office, and it wouldn’t be the last. This time, however, Principal Ann Tash had also summoned the girl’s family and the full three-teacher faculty of tiny Henry David Thoreau High School in Woodland Hills.

A few days earlier Sally had flunked a test in the worst way. A drug-detection card dipped in a urine specimen raised a disturbing question: Was Sally again using heroin?

Thoreau High has evolved into a kind of magnet school for teenagers battling drug or alcohol addiction. Home of one of the most aggressive anti-drug programs in any American public school, Thoreau pursues a mission conceived and implemented by educators who are themselves recovering addicts and alcoholics.

The idea is to create an environment in which peer pressure compels teenagers to stay clean and sober. To enroll, they and their parents must sign waivers allowing drug testing at any time; their first urinalysis must test clean. In daily meetings, students are encouraged to embrace the spiritually based 12-step regimen first popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous and to look upon educators who participate in the sessions as peers in recovery.

When lapses are suspected, Thoreau’s nurturing staff members become tough authority figures--as they did in December with Sally.

Sullen and defiant, the 16-year-old sophomore sat, with arms folded, between her mother and English teacher Gail Nettels, a recovering cocaine addict.

In recent meetings Nettels had heard the same greeting: “I’m Sally and I’m an addict. I have six months.” Meaning six months clean and sober, if she could be believed. Nettels had responded only with hard stares, “cross-talk” being forbidden in 12-step meetings.

But now she put her face inches from Sally’s. You’re lying, the teacher said. I can see it in your eyes.

Soon tears were tumbling from those eyes. But Sally stuck to her story.

Allan Nathan, a volunteer counselor, ratcheted up the verbal pressure. He calmly accused Sally of lying and encouraged her older sister Teri, also a Thoreau student, to speak up. Angrily, Teri told her sister that she was full of lies, though in more earthy terms. (Sally and Teri are pseudonyms; in reporting this story, The Times agreed to mask student identities. A small number of the 65 students at the school are not enrolled in the drug program.)

On Tash’s desk sat a small plastic cup with a screw-on top that contained a new, not-yet-tested urine specimen. Should they test it now, in front of the girl?

Sally’s mother softly spoke of her desire to believe her daughter, but also of her doubts. Sally’s stepfather asked about the possibility of a false positive: too many poppy seed bagels, perhaps? He declared that there was no way the new specimen would test positive, since he knew Sally had been home all weekend.

The principal grimaced. The line between a parent’s supportive trust and denial is fine and dangerous.

Tash left her dilemma unexpressed: A dip test now, showing positive, might give Sally’s parents the sense of urgency they seemed to lack. But what if it came out negative? Better, Tash figured, to send this specimen to a lab and wait for a more thorough analysis.

Tash reminded everybody of a few hard facts: Sally had a history of heroin abuse. She had recently tested dirty. Just a week earlier, her friend and classmate Marie had been placed in a rehab clinic after a heroin relapse.

The conference ended with Sally still defiant and her parents agreeing to seek additional counseling off campus.

With the family gone, Nathan unscrewed the plastic cap and dipped a test card in. Like a report card that lists subjects, it features boxes representing different drugs. Two lines mean negative, one means positive.

In the box for morphine, an indicator of recent heroin use, a single line appeared.

An Alternative Among Alternative Schools

In September, shortly after students returned from summer vacation, there were no single lines. Every student in the day program tested clean. (A small number of Thoreau students attend night classes.)

Those results didn’t mean that all had stayed sober the whole summer--far from it. Students are known to study the Internet looking for the latest techniques to fool such tests. Even without trickery, the dip cards open a window on only a few days’ behavior at best. But still, it was a good day at Thoreau.

How ironic it would be, the educators told each other, if a campus for addicts was the only truly drug-free high school in Southern California.

Success is relative. Across Winnetka Avenue, Taft High revels in its Los Angeles city championship football team and its scholars bound for fine universities.

At Thoreau, a gas-station-sized campus tucked behind a Ralphs supermarket, progress is more gradual. Nobody was surprised when several students started backsliding.

Even Sally finally admitted slipping. The evening after the confrontation in the principal’s office, she confessed to her mother that, yes, she had resumed using heroin. Some time would pass before Sally could join the ranks of Thoreau students who, according to 12-step custom, earn “chips” to herald milestones of sobriety--30 days, 90 days, six months. A year earns a “birthday” cake.

The 12 steps, the foundation of Thoreau’s mission, promote an honor system that is easily fooled. Based on drug tests and gut instinct, Tash says she suspects that, at any given time, 10% of students are trying to con the staff. Many students who lie later admit the truth with a sense of guilt and shame.

Skeptics abounded when Tash and Nettels first approached Los Angeles Unified School District brass three years ago with their idea for a school dedicated to saving young addicts.

They sought to set Thoreau apart as an alternative among alternative schools. Continuation schools, as they are commonly referred to, are designed for students who cause too much trouble to remain in mainstream high schools. Most are affiliated with a nearby high school; Thoreau had been Taft’s alternative.

Administrators had many worries, including the fear that a school mainly for teenage addicts might make a bad situation worse.

Some wondered whether the 12-step liturgy, with its frequent references to God, would violate the separation of church and state. The Los Angeles school board, however, had already addressed that question a decade ago when it welcomed a counseling program called IMPACT, which on occasion refers to 12-step doctrine.

Now in its second year, the Thoreau program receives much more praise than criticism. The school has won trophies for the best attendance record among the district’s 50 continuation schools, and academic performance has improved. Although several students have relapsed, many also credit Thoreau with helping them stay away from drugs. Some have earned a high school diploma in Thoreau’s classrooms or returned to mainstream schools.

“This deserves a big test and a chance to succeed,” said Beth Newman, the Los Angeles Unified administrator of continuation schools, who was skeptical at first. “You tell parents about it, and they say, ‘What’s the phone number?’. . . Sometimes we have to take extreme steps if it’s an extreme situation.”

The Shock of 4 Student Funerals

For Principal Tash, extreme was four funerals for students whose deaths were drug- or alcohol-related.

The first was more than eight years ago, shortly before she left Reseda High for Thoreau. That student had died in a suicide pact with her father. In Tash’s first two years at Thoreau, before the anti-drug program began, there were three more deaths--a car accident, an overdose, a suicide.

Thoreau’s staff took the deaths hard. Such schools attract educators who prefer the intimacy of a campus where they get to know every student personally. Unlike in regular classrooms with lectures and tests, teachers guide the students along individual study programs and, regardless of the job description, inevitably serve as counselors as well.

This is true even for the two full-time teachers who don’t have drug or alcohol problems. Science teacher Allan Tamshen, who has been at Thoreau 17 years, helped one student temporarily avoid drugs by introducing him to the natural high of surfing.

On big campuses “you teach the content,” social studies teacher Jean Kilmurray said. “Here you teach the student.”

On a low shelf in Tash’s office, not far from the attendance trophy, is the framed portrait of a smiling young man. The night of his graduation, the principal recalls, the boy was at a party, “frying on LSD” and fiddling with a handgun. “Later,” he casually told friends before placing the barrel in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

Tash keeps up with the evolving drug vernacular. Instead of merely getting high or stoned on marijuana, Thoreau students are apt to speak of “getting faded.” “Tweaking” pertains to inhaling crystal methamphetamine powder (speed) or sometimes cocaine, and “frying” applies to hallucinogens such as LSD.

Heroin, meanwhile, has become so cheap that it is often snorted or smoked. Sally, however, is among those who still prefer “slamming”--injecting it directly into a vein--for the rush that precedes a feeling she likens to nirvana.

The principal can step out her door and see dozens of students whose lives, she fears, could be claimed by drugs and alcohol. Scattered among them are some so devoted to “working the program”--the 12 steps--that Tash is confident they have healthy futures. But most, she says, could easily OD or kill themselves another way.

By their appearance--the baggy clothes, the hairstyles, the multiple body piercings--Thoreau’s students could blend in on most campuses, usually among the “stoner” crowd. They are not unlike hundreds of thousands of American teenagers who take dangerous chances with drugs and alcohol, and often become addicted.

Many are children of the drug culture. Their parents have drug and alcohol problems as well and, in a few cases, have no objections to their children drinking or getting faded. Sally and Teri barely know their father, a junkie who went to prison for bank robbery.

For most Thoreau students, the term “dysfunctional family” is inadequate.

Billy, 18, was once a promising baseball player. His dad coached him well but also smoked weed and used speed--in recent years, with Billy’s sister. Billy was in the eighth grade when his sister turned him on to marijuana. Later he moved to LSD and occasionally inhaled nitrous oxide for the numbing sensation he describes as “the wah-wahs.”

Nancy, 17, arrived at Thoreau in December. On her first day she filled out a questionnaire: “What do you remember most clearly about your early childhood?” Nancy wrote: “Taking care of three young kids while my parents were getting loaded.”

During that day’s 12-step meeting, Nancy took her turn: “A lot of things are going wrong at home. My dad is smoking rock again. My mom and dad are, like, separating. My brother is starting to smoke pot, and I’m trying to cut out all that stuff as much as possible.”

Like some students, 16-year-old Amy said her immediate family never had drug or drinking problems. Still, to fit in with older kids, she started drinking and smoking pot at age 11 and moved on to speed at 13.

One day after snorting crystal meth she was shopping with her mother and collapsed on the floor of the mall. Blood tests detected arsenic in her system that weakened her heart. She said that, with her damaged heart, she’ll never again use drugs: “I can’t. I’ll die.”

Some of Alicia’s story is expressed in an autobiographical poem displayed in Nettels’ English class, beneath the words “Excellent Work.”

Behind some bush, atop a damp blanket,

Somewhere in the middle of Golden Gate Park in the dead of winter,

Some man of which I hardly knew (yet had already committed to) sat next to me holding out my arm.

Pipe dream rumor says that he was once a doctor yet it was so cold that he still couldn’t find a vein.

This was his life and I believed he liked it that way. Excitement and freedom? Erased off the grid? Living in a sleeping bag yet scarcely sleeping. . . . So he hit me, then he hit himself. We both forgot the problems. . . .

But the next day I realized again I didn’t belong. . . . I was 13 with a 23-year-old man sticking needles in my arm and living in the park. . . .

Something is not right.

Alicia’s mother tells of how, after her daughter ran away, word came that Alicia might be in San Francisco, near Golden Gate Park.

Mother and son were showing Alicia’s picture to strangers on the park’s edge when a gloomy man suggested the girl was probably dead.

“Look, there’s a McDonald’s!” Alicia’s mother, frantic to change the subject, told her son. “Let’s go get a Happy Meal!”

Inside the restaurant they found Alicia.

‘Functioning Addict’ Stops Functioning

Thoreau High’s transformation might be traced to the day nearly five years ago when one self-described “functioning addict” simply stopped functioning.

That was the day Gail Nettels hit bottom. Looking back, she seems amazed that she was able to hold down a teaching job even as cocaine tightened its grip. She was a “dyed-in-the-wool atheist” then, but she now thanks God she had the good sense to stop drinking and using drugs after learning she was pregnant.

After her daughter was born, Nettels said, she went back to cocaine “with a vengeance.” Divorce accelerated her tailspin. The first two years of her daughter’s life, she said, “I was really a horrible, negligent mother. I need to say that in order to stay humble and not be complacent.”

She was teaching then at Mission High, a continuation school in Pacoima. One morning she couldn’t get out of bed. Friends persuaded her to enter a residential rehab facility that preached the 12 steps.

Instructed to pray for “the willingness to want to stop drinking and using drugs,” Nettels figured, what the hell, I’ve got nothing to lose praying to a deity I don’t believe in.

But on the 10th day, “somehow I heard what we call ‘the Message.’ . . . I realized I wanted to stop. I prayed unwillingly and cynically to stop using--and it worked.”

She landed a job at Thoreau, then a traditional continuation school. At Mission, Nettels says, the overriding concerns were gangs and teen pregnancy. At Thoreau, it was clearly drug abuse.

Nettels found an ally in her principal. More private than Nettels, Tash prefers only to describe herself as “a member of the recovering community” and someone who knows too well the damage that alcoholism and addiction can cause a family.

Nettels started to offer 12-step meetings to interested students. What Thoreau needed, the principal and teacher agreed, was something far more aggressive. They came up with an idea loosely based on Sobriety High in Edina, Minn., a private, nonprofit school for students who had been treated in residential rehab programs.

Thoreau’s staff crafted a pilot program, but they weren’t sure whether they would attract enough teens who were committed to kicking addiction.

Then a burly middle-aged man showed up with a request. Allan Nathan explained that he was a recovering heroin and cocaine addict who once spent eight months in county lockup for dealing.

Now Nathan was the director of Progress House, a group home in Woodland Hills for teenage boys trying to kick drugs by using the 12 steps. Could his boys enroll at Thoreau?

To Nettels and Tash, it felt like divine intervention.

Students Call the Program Brainwashing

Once Thoreau’s staff overcame resistance from the district brass, they faced a new obstacle.

This is bogus, the students would say. You’re trying to ram this down our throats. You’re trying to brainwash us.

Call it brainwashing if you want, Tash and Nettels and Nathan replied. But we know it saved us.

Many students who sign up for the 12-step program still resist it--or just go through the motions. But even some of the cynics are won over.

Jon, 18, once was the busiest LSD dealer at Verdugo Hills High. He had come to Thoreau via Progress House, where his parents had boarded him after Jon had been snared in an undercover campus sting.

A recent Thoreau graduate, Jon often returns to do janitorial work as “community service” under terms of his probation. Having heard the Message, he often joins in the 12-step meetings.

Thoreau’s Tuesday meetings are reserved for guest speakers, usually adults involved in Narcotics Anonymous or AA. But one Tuesday Jon did the honors as part of his own 12-step “birthday” celebration.

Bright and articulate, he began by reminiscing about the mellow hippie types who turned him on to drugs--and how, later, another kind of dealer once threatened him at gunpoint. He laughed recalling a party at which he passed out--and how he later learned that his friends, unsure whether a drug was safe, tested it by putting it in his mouth.

Jon talked about how he could feel his world caving in--how he sensed doom if he didn’t quit. Working the steps, he said, made him understand how much better life could be.

As cake was being served, a former classmate told Jon that, the way he talked, he should be a lawyer.

“Ms. Tash, do you think I could be a lawyer?” Jon asked.

“Jon,” the principal replied, “I think you can be anything you want to be.”

‘I Don’t Like Myself Too Much’

Holidays can be tough for addicts. There are parties and other temptations.

Even before Thoreau’s students returned from their three-week winter break, some were known to have relapsed. Three boys in Progress House dropped acid; one boy was so fried he was readmitted to a residential rehab center. Sally, however, appeared to have stayed clean.

Marie, the 16-year-old girl who had relapsed on heroin five weeks before, still wasn’t back in school. Tash and two teachers--Nettels and Kilmurray--visited her at a treatment facility in Malibu.

“I don’t like myself too much,” Marie said, hugging a brown teddy bear she received as a Christmas present. “In elementary school I was the quiet girl who always read. A lot of kids made fun of me. . . . I wanted to shock them all”--a distant look, a quick smile--”I wanted to be the bad girl, doing crazier things than anyone else.”

Marie twice ran away from home at age 14. Once, like Alicia, she wound up in San Francisco, where she first tried heroin.

“I think I kind of matured quickly, on the whole,” she said. Marie is sweet, sad, fragile. Clutching the bear, she obliquely suggested that she had few friends, prompting the teachers to hand her notes from classmates.

“I really want to come home so bad,” Marie said. “I guess I’m going to have to work the steps.”

But will you stay clean?

“I can’t see into the future.”

“That’s why,” Tash replied, “we take it one day at a time.”

‘The Clarity That Comes With Sobriety’

In February one semester segued into another--a time to take stock. Ten Thoreau students had completed graduation requirements, an unusually high number that Tash attributed to “the clarity that comes with sobriety.” A few other students were “mainstreamed” back into traditional high schools.

Ten others, however, were expelled or transferred for various transgressions, mostly repeated drug relapses.

Shortly after the second semester began, Billy was mainstreamed into El Camino High. Marie returned to campus with the proviso that she remain under 24-hour adult supervision for 60 days. Fifteen new students arrived at Thoreau, some from Taft, where they had played on the championship football team.

One day, accusations of drug use among a few girls boiled over into a crisis that prompted Tash to convene the whole school to defuse the tension. She decided to move three girls out of the day program.

A girl named Sandi was transferred to another continuation school, which refused to enroll her, leaving her in a kind of academic limbo. Not only had Sandi relapsed, but she admitted conning Thoreau’s staff for more than a year. Tash was so certain Sandi had been clean that she seldom bothered her with a urinalysis.

Nancy, the girl who arrived expressing hopes of staying clean, lasted less than two months before she was expelled. One problem was that Nancy was content in the belief that she had kicked speed by replacing it with pot. Tash said she learned that Nancy sometimes smoked with her parents--and that they wanted her out of Thoreau.

The third girl was Sally. Tash decided to move her into Thoreau’s night program after both she and Nettels became convinced that the girl was using and dealing the so-called designer drug Ecstasy--a substance that baffles urinalysis.

Sally insisted it wasn’t true.

Her denials left Nettels shaking her head and recalling the day, not long after their December confrontation in the principal’s office, that the teacher introduced a new student to the girl.

“This is Sally. She hates me,” the teacher half-joked.

“I don’t hate you, Miss Nettels,” Sally protested. “You just don’t believe me when I lie.”