The student gasped for breath. Her eyes widened. Her pupils shrunk.
Slumping in a chair in a conference room at W.C. Overfelt High School in late October, she was showing all the signs of overdosing on the powerful opioid fentanyl.
Principal Vito Chiala’s safety team had rushed her in when they encountered her walking to class and knew something was off. But now, she was slipping in and out of consciousness. They had all been trained to administer the nasal spray Narcan, which can reverse opioid overdoses. But that was last summer. Did they remember everything? Were they supposed to squirt it into one nostril or two? Was there a safety latch?
With emergency crews on the way, Chiala opened the small white box and triple-checked the fold-out instructions as teacher Natalia Gomez held the teenager steady. The girl gasped again. Her head fell backward. Then, she stopped breathing.
Chiala gripped the small, syringe-like device.
“Just put it in,” Gomez said. “Push the red button!”
‘Narcan Superman’
The frightening overdose on the East San Jose campus wasn’t the only time school officials took action to save a student from fentanyl in the Bay Area this fall. Only two days later and eight miles away at Oak Grove High School in South San Jose, a school social worker was dispatched across campus to revive a teenage boy who started showing signs of an overdose in class. The social worker had been trained to use Narcan just the day before.
Suddenly, Bay Area schools are playing a critical role in combating the alarming rise of fentanyl that is spilling onto high school campuses.
Is your school ready?
A Bay Area News Group survey of 42 high school districts found that 60% of those responding have yet to train their teachers and staff on how to recognize the signs of fentanyl poisoning and how to administer the life-saving drug naloxone known by its brand name Narcan. Some districts insist fentanyl is not a problem at their schools, and therefore not a priority. Educators like Chiala say waiting for the dangerous drug to show up on campus could be a deadly mistake.
“I don’t want to be Narcan Superman,” Chiala said. “My job is to help students prepare for the future. That being said, part of that job is keeping them safe and helping them understand how to keep each other safe.”
Desarie Abeyta said her 15-year-old brother’s high school wasn’t prepared when he overdosed at Downtown College Prep’s El Primero High, a charter school in San Jose. A week before Thanksgiving, he nearly passed out on the bathroom floor after saying he ate a classmate’s brownie that he didn’t know was laced with drugs.
Abeyta posted a diatribe on Instagram that she was “disgusted and appalled” by the school’s response. Instead of calling 911 or seeking medical treatment, the school called his sister to pick him up because he was sick, according to interviews with Abeyta, her brother and school officials. When she arrived, she found her brother on a bench in the school lobby “incoherent and pale and couldn’t even walk.”
An urgent care doctor later diagnosed his symptoms as “poisoning by fentanyl.”
“This could have been way worse,” Abeyta, 34, told the Bay Area News Group. “It normally takes a little bit of fentanyl to overdose – and they didn’t call 911. That’s what I’m just dumbfounded about.”
Scourge at the doorstep
School districts are not required to report fentanyl cases to health officials, so it’s unclear how many Bay Area schools have had firsthand encounters with the deadly opioid on campus.
But last year, at least 77 youth, ages 15 to 19, were rushed to emergency rooms after experiencing acute opioid poisoning in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, according to the California Overdose Dashboard. Santa Clara County alone reported 34 ER visits – the most of any Bay Area county.
Schools across California discovered the scourge of fentanyl at their doorstep as students returned to the classroom from the COVID-19 lockdowns.
With supplies of the cheap and easy-to-smuggle drug exploding in recent years on the West Coast, teens often have no idea they are dealing with fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin. To hook their customers, drug cartels are increasingly mixing it into less powerful stimulants and painkillers, like counterfeit Adderall and Percocet, that are easy to buy online.
The toll has been staggering. A Bay Area News Group analysis, first reported in October, found that in 2020 and 2021, fentanyl was responsible for one-fifth of the deaths of Californians between the ages of 15 and 24. The drug now kills more people across the U.S. than auto accidents.
And kids everywhere are vulnerable.
The 5 signs your child may be overdosing on fentanyl
Two students at upscale Los Gatos High fatally overdosed off campus in 2020. That same year, a 12-year-old girl in San Jose snorted three-quarters of a crushed “M-30” pill containing fentanyl with friends in the back of a car. She went into distress and died shortly after they rushed her to the hospital, according to the District Attorney’s office.
In Marin County, a 17-year-old boy died after ingesting a fake Percocet pill laced with fentanyl that he got from a friend. This year, on April 1, a Los Altos High student died at home after overdosing.
The problem is just as menacing in Southern California. Seven students overdosed in the Los Angeles Unified School District in September, including a girl who died in the bathroom at her high school in Hollywood.
In the aftermath, L.A. Unified quickly began supplying Narcan to every K-12 school a decision that would save the lives of another seven students over the next two months, officials say.
Santa Clara County leaders had already taken notice.
‘Not our problem’
Last spring, with growing evidence of a crisis among local teens, Supervisor Cindy Chavez and District Attorney Jeff Rosen launched an ambitious program to make sure every high school received training on how to recognize fentanyl, education materials and Narcan kits by the end of the year.
Not every school district has jumped at the invitation.
“We got some push that ‘Oh, it’s not our problem. We don’t want to do it,’” said Mira Parwiz, one of the leaders of the county’s overdose prevention program that’s helping train schools.
For instance, San Jose Unified, the county’s largest school district, has yet to sign up for the county’s training classes or Narcan kits.
“It’s really hard to say if we are behind the ball or not,” San Jose Unified spokeswoman Jennifer Maddox told the Bay Area News Group. “I think if we were seeing opioid overdoses at school, we would see this as a higher priority.”
The Bay Area News Group survey of high school districts in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties found San Jose Unified is far from the only one lagging.
Sixty percent of the 35 districts that responded to the survey said they had not trained their staff on how to recognize the signs of fentanyl poisoning, and 63% said they did not have a readily available supply of Narcan on school campuses.
While the results were sobering, there were encouraging signs that many of those districts are poised to act: 34% of the school districts – including Oakland, Castro Valley, Palo Alto and Hayward – said they plan to train their staffs within the next two months. And 43% said they plan to stock up on Narcan in the next two months.
California schools may soon have no choice.
With the growing danger so clear, state Sen. Dave Cortese of San Jose announced a bill in November to spread Santa Clara County’s training model to all California schools, and another bill from Republican Assemblymember Joe Patterson of Rocklin would make it mandatory for every school to have at least two doses of Narcan on campus.
Last week in Contra Costa County, John Swett Unified added fentanyl training to its broader safety class for staff members. Paramedic Jonathan Cervera taught 150 staff members about fentanyl and Narcan. The district’s next step is ordering Narcan for their schools.
“Everybody gets trained on CPR, why not add Narcan?” Cervera said.
There’s little excuse for a lack of urgency, officials say, especially since the National Institutes of Health says Narcan is safe to use even if administered unnecessarily.
“What I don’t want to happen is kids dropping dead on campus. Having Narcan on hand would prevent, at the very least, the deaths,” said Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Ed Liang, part of the county’s task force that’s distributing Narcan to schools. “It’s really about preventing parents from having to pick up their kids’ dead bodies at school.”
Like active shooter training
At Overfelt, Principal Chiala was determined that the tragedy that shook the high school in Hollywood wouldn’t happen on his campus in San Jose’s East Side Union High School District.
Like schools across the country, Overfelt has spent plenty of time training to respond to active shooters, he said, so “why wouldn’t we train for something that’s far more prevalent in our community?”
Last summer, he and about a quarter of the teachers and staff members received the county fentanyl training. And Chiala and his safety team went on high alert just five weeks into this school year when a student turned in a blue “M-30” fentanyl pill found on the bathroom floor.
Staff member Rachel Stanek, who lost friends to methamphetamine overdoses during her college years, quickly pulled together a Zoom presentation using resources from the DA’s office about the dangers of the opioid. She made sure it aired in every homeroom class.
“We need to make sure that students understand what it is,” Stanek said, “so that if someone’s in the bathroom and someone says, ‘Hey, do this,’ they at least understand that it could potentially be fatal.”
On the afternoon of Oct. 26, they faced their biggest test. Stanek and associate principal Jennifer Castro were the first to encounter the troubled girl on campus. She had just left the bathroom and was late to class when Castro’s “mother instincts” kicked in.
School officials didn’t want to go into details to protect the girl’s privacy, but they were keeping a close eye on her that week. Castro was hyper-vigilant from the death of her nephew, a Bay Area teenager, who overdosed on what was likely fentanyl last year – and knew something was wrong.
“To think of that and then just see it firsthand, I’m just kind of in this emergency mode,” Castro said, “like, I’m going to make sure that we give the appropriate care.”
They gathered the girl up in their golf cart and, with walkie-talkies in hand, alerted the safety team that they were on the way to the front office conference room. Castro called the girl’s mom, following the school’s protocol to call a parent when a student appears to be under the influence of drugs.
As the girl’s symptoms escalated over the next half-hour, however, they beckoned Chiala, who grabbed a box of Narcan on the way. The tell-tale signs of fentanyl poisoning – the tiny pupils, the nodding off and waking up – were becoming clear. Administrative assistant Jacqueline Rosas called 911 while Chiala studied the directions one more time. Then the girl stopped breathing. Emergency crews were still minutes away. Chiala had no choice then.
With Gomez bracing the girl from behind, he pushed the red end of the syringe.
With a whoosh, the girl snapped back.
“Within 10 seconds, but it might have even been faster, the student started breathing again,” the principal said. “And within 10 minutes (she) was clear-headed, back to normal.”
‘I probably could have died’
Desarie Abeyta’s brother Anthony is still fuzzy about the morning he overdosed at El Primero High. But the experience was so terrifying that at one point he thought “I probably could have died.”
A week later, sitting in the apartment he shares with his older sister, Anthony told the Bay Area News Group what he remembers.
He was heading to class, he said, when another student offered him a brownie. It was wrapped in a napkin, and he gobbled it down.
With a history of addiction in his family, which had left him in the care of his sister, Anthony had vowed to stay away from drugs. He barely knew what fentanyl was, he said, and had no indication the brownie might be laced with the drug. Within about 10 minutes, he started feeling dizzy.
“My vision started getting blurry and then it was like everything in the world was going down, down – it was just weird,” he said.
When the school called Abeyta, they told her they had to clear out the classroom because Anthony threw up so much and that he was on the bathroom floor and “not really responding.”
“I’m like, what do you mean?” she said. “Then I started freaking out.”
School officials didn’t call 911, she said, and didn’t tell her what Anthony had told them – that “someone gave him something.”
‘Teachable moment’
When Abeyta got the call, she was busy working at the Bill Wilson Center, a San Jose nonprofit, leading a life skills workshop for at-risk youth that included a discussion on fentanyl. She even gave each one in her group a box of Narcan. “We give it out more than we give out condoms,” she said.
In that moment, she couldn’t comprehend that her kid brother may have overdosed on fentanyl. Maybe it was some severe stomach flu, she thought. But when she arrived on campus 40 minutes later, his symptoms matched the signs of fentanyl poisoning she had just warned about in her workshop:
His face was gray and his lips were purple. He was fading in and out of consciousness. His shirt was covered in vomit. He struggled to catch his breath.
Abeyta rushed her brother to urgent care on Capitol Avenue, where a doctor listed fentanyl poisoning as the diagnosis, according to a summary of his visit that the family shared with the Bay Area News Group.
The next day, Abeyta confronted Principal Jordan Apgar. The principal told her, she said, that Anthony’s was the school’s first fentanyl case and blamed a communication breakdown among the staff for failing to understand the severity of his condition.
In a brief interview with the Bay Area News Group a week later, Apgar said no one at her school had yet gone through the training on how to detect fentanyl poisoning or administer Narcan.
But the charter school’s CEO Pete Settelmayer later said that five members of the school’s operations staff had undergone the county training in late October and had Narcan on campus – but nobody had informed the principal. Settelmayer acknowledged the school had no plan in place to launch into action, calling the incident a “teachable moment the whole organization learned from.” School officials said they were unable to track down the source of the drug.
Abeyta didn’t intend to make her brother a poster child for the perils of fentanyl, she said. But she decided that posting his photo, his name and his story on Instagram might help others. Anthony agreed – especially since he says he didn’t intend to ingest drugs. Her post received dozens of comments, including one from the mother of the Overfelt girl who had been revived by Narcan.
“It’s either me posting this and using Anthony as awareness,” Abeyta said, “or having his picture out here as a ‘Rest in Peace, Anthony,’ because that’s very much what could have happened.”
In the days after Anthony’s experience, the principal sent emails to parents, and teachers talked with students in class about the dangers of fentanyl.
“This is the next pandemic,” Settelmayer said. “Our responsibility as an organization is to make sure that we are prepared to face the next pandemic, which is making sure that staff is trained.”
‘One pill can kill’
In the aftermath of the overdose at Overfelt, Principal Chiala and his safety team reviewed every detail of how they responded to the fentanyl crisis that October day.
But not until after the girl was discharged from the hospital and returned to campus two weeks later did he fully comprehend how close she came to losing her life.
“That was the moment when it hit me most emotionally,” Chiala said, “like, ‘Oh wow, what a beautiful young person who is still with us and deserves to be here with us.’”
Still, Chiala doesn’t have any misperceptions that “we saved the day and now everything’s good forever. Life goes on and life’s a challenge.”
The last thing schools want to be known for are drug problems on campus, he said. In an East San Jose, largely Latino school like Overfelt that is already fighting stereotypes, Chiala would rather be talking about the 92 graduates who started at San Jose State this year and all the money they’re raising by Christmas for scholarships.
But when it mattered most, when a troubled child needed a team to save her, Overfelt High School was prepared. After another workshop this month, a full half of the staff will have been trained to use Narcan. Twin-packs of it are strategically placed around campus.
Chiala keeps a spare kit in the cupboard behind his desk, wedged between the bags of Almond Joy and Starburst he uses to refill his candy jar. He also keeps his office door open. Students flow in and out, passing posters in the hallway that say “One Pill Can Kill.”
“We did what we had to do,” Chiala said. “We were part of a process that should be in place everywhere, quite honestly. It just should be.”
Staff Writer Harriet Blair Rowan contributed to this report.
