Faced with the realities of an estimated 5 percent of Maryland high school freshmen having tried heroin and police in Harford County having investigated 17 overdoses on the drug in six weeks, public school officials in the county say they're working to keep on top of, and curb, drug abuse trends.
Those efforts include everything from keeping abreast of the latest drug slang to incorporating drug abuse education into school system health education programs.
Drug education "is not the Civil War. It changes every day," County Schools Health Education Supervisor Ginny Popiolek told the county's Board of Education during a presentation earlier this week.
The school system has not "specifically" dealt with the new wave of heroin abuse, but "we deal with all risky behavior, and information that is associated with heroin is one that is part of our curriculum," she said.
Educators do work to stay on top of the latest slang terms, such as "krokodil" for synthetic heroin, she said.
Board member Bob Frisch said he wondered if "we weren't doing as much as might" to address heroin specifically.
The Maryland Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 2013 showed more than 5 percent of ninth grade students had tried heroin, up from 1 percent in 2007, Joe Ryan, director of the county's Office of Drug Control Policy, said Wednesday.
"It's been a five-fold increase," he said about the "alarming" rise in heroin use among high school freshmen.
Nevertheless, he said, "our health teachers are doing an excellent job teaching health education."
Schools have shifted in recent years to make drug education part of general health education, instead of using specialized drug-abuse prevention programs, Popiolek said.
The school system had a supervisor of drug abuse prevention from 2002 to 2008. Between 2008 and 2011, the school system had a partly-funded teacher specialist for health education focusing on drug abuse.
The school system hopes to use data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey to analyze trends, Popiolek said. The Youth Survey features student-reported data.
Superintendent Barbara Canavan told Popiolek that she, county Community Services Director Amber Shrodes and Ryan "will be talking about how we can move forward in this fight against drugs and protect not only our children but the adults in our community."
Ryan concurred that drug education has focused on prevention, "since the recovery rate [from heroin abuse] is around 3 percent."
Staying ahead of the curve on drug use continues to be a struggle for local educators, he said. Ecstasy, for example, was a big problem about 10 years ago, and methamphetamine was a problem in some other states but not as much locally.
Prescription drugs were "a major issue" in Harford in recent years, until heroin abuse supplanted it, according to local health and law enforcement officials. Last summer, the county's heroin problem was part of a television documentary focused on Baltimore City that shone a spotlight on dealers who buy the drug cheap in the city and resell to young users in Harford.
Harford County Executive Barry Glassman made the fight against the drug a major focus of his first State of the County address last month, pledging to implement a comprehensive program to combat abuse with more education and treatment programs, in addition to support for law enforcement in putting dealers out of operation.
Gov. Larry Hogan also targeted the state's heroin epidemic in his inaugural speech.
Harford Sheriff Jeff Gahler has instituted a program in which narcotics task force detectives go out on every overdose incident to gather evidence that can be used to arrest those who supplied the drug.
Since that new protocol started Jan. 1, the task force had handled 17 heroin overdose calls through Wednesday night, five of which were fatal, Sheriff's Office spokesperson Cristie Kahler said Thursday. Two dealers were arrested and charged in January, and several other cases remain under investigation, she said.
Kahler said the Sheriff's Office will be sharing its numbers with Ryan's office, so everyone involved can get a better understanding of the depth of the problem.
"We have got to keep changing," Ryan said, adding the goal is to explain to students the threat to their futures, instead of only warning about health risks like national drug-abuse programs did in the past.
"Scare tactics don't work," he said. "We want to give them the tools, when someone offers them a drug, to have the ability to make the right decision."
"We tell them, their future depends on their decision," he said.