LEWISTON — A state-mandated naloxone training will be offered at public schools in the area soon. Lewiston schools have plans underway for their first training session next week, Lewiston Middle School Principal Amanda Bryant said Tuesday.

“I have sent an informational letter home to parents. A few parents have let me know they do not want their child to participate. We are doing a Google survey this Wednesday with students to get an idea of how many are interested,” Bryant said Tuesday.

Naloxone, known by the brand name Narcan, is a medication that can revive people who overdose on opioids. It works by quickly blocking an opioid’s effects on the brain and lungs to prevent death following an overdose. Associated Press file

“Once I have an idea of how many students I am looking at, I will schedule the number of trainings I need. I plan to do them from 7:45 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. in the morning, so kids do not miss class time,” Bryant added. “This is our homeroom and academic seminar time, like a guided study hall.”

Naloxone is a medication that can revive people who overdose on opioids. Once administered, it quickly blocks the drug’s effects on the brain and lungs to prevent death in the aftermath of an overdose. According to the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, naloxone is effective on drugs such as morphine, heroin, methadone, codeine and fentanyl, among others.

It has no potential for abuse as it isn’t a habit-forming substance. It will not affect a person if they do not have any opioids in their system. In addition, naloxone comes in two FDA-approved forms — injectable and nasal spray. Schools are set to stock the nasal spray form.

Auburn Public Schools has yet to announce their plans. Superintendent Susan Dorris said Edward Little High School Principal Scott Annear was in charge of organizing the training.

“We are still in the gathering info and planning stage here,” Annear said in an email Tuesday.

The law that was signed into effect by Gov. Mills last summer does not mandate students take part. However, the schools must offer the training.

“I think a really important caveat to this piece of legislation is that it is not a required education for young people, but more so for young people and their parents who want them to have access to this education,” Courtney Gary-Allen, organizing director at Maine Recovery Advocacy Project, said Tuesday. Gary-Allen, who is also an At-Large City Councilor in Augusta, has been involved with the work that went into introducing the bill.

According to Gary-Allen, the bill came into being through the efforts of youth who had been impacted by substance use.

“They came together and said that they had all, individually or collectively, had experiences where they wished they had had education around naloxone,” Gary-Allen recalled. Sen. Matthew Pouliot, R-Kennebec, sponsored the bill after hearing the stories behind the push for the legislation.

Gary-Allen thinks the bill’s unanimous passing “really speaks to the desire for all Mainers to have access to naloxone and have education around how to protect our loved ones, whether or not you’re a Democrat, Republican, young or old.”

“It really clearly reminds us that substance use disorder is not a political issue. It’s an issue that impacts all Mainers,” Gary-Allen added.

“Equipping all young people with the knowledge about how to administer naloxone provides an opportunity for both awareness of overdose in the state, and conversations about why doing drugs isn’t great and what the consequences of that are,” Pouliot said Tuesday.

“I do not think (naloxone training or availability) is going to normalize drug use. Certainly, naloxone is no (cure-all) to the overdoses that are happening. But one thing is for sure, if more people are not familiar with how to administer this potentially life-saving antidote, more deaths will occur,” Pouliot said. “We have no evidence to show that more education will result in more use or more deaths. There’s no evidence to support that nationally, and I don’t believe that that will be the case in Maine.”

“We encourage parents to take a good look at it the same way they would look at an EpiPen or an external defibrillator,” Gordon Smith, director of opioid response at the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, said Tuesday. “This is about saving lives.”

“While we would hope that as many students as possible would be trained to administer naloxone, we also recognize the right of parents to not authorize their children’s participation,” Smith said. “That’s a choice that parents have, and that’s part of what we worked out with the Legislature.”

“We just hope that parents would recognize that every citizen, every family, every student, everybody’s in a position to help here. We don’t want any overdose deaths,” Smith said.

“When I started in February of 2019, I only knew of one school, one alternative school that had naloxone on site,” Smith recalled. “Now, we have trainings and naloxone in well over 100 high schools.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve got kids 9, 10, 11, 12 years old using drugs,” Smith said. “It’s shocking, but our job is to make sure they don’t die, and to help them get into treatment. That’s what we do every single day.”

“Drugs aren’t just used by adults, as much as society has plagued conversations in regards to this; we do see overdoses by kids yearly,” Molly Whyte, a parent of Lewiston High School student, said Tuesday.

“We as a society do not do enough to show and teach kids about (drugs), we stick to ‘drugs are bad’ and hope kids aren’t rebellious,” Whyte said. “Kids sometimes like to learn and know things, and sometimes even when we don’t want them to have experiences, they have them anyways. If we want kids to learn, they need to know the whole story. They need to know how to help.”

In other parts of the state, districts are similarly figuring out plans for naloxone training. Biddeford Assistant Superintendent Christopher Indorf said the middle and high schools are still working on scheduling the training sessions for students.

“The Legislature has passed myriad laws — including this one — with required trainings, or requirements to offer training, so we use the lion’s share of our fall staff professional development time on these state-mandated trainings,” he said.

At the middle school, the training will be offered during Tiger Time, a flexible learning and schoolwide activity time each morning.

Last spring, high school students were trained during small advisory group sessions. The training was led by the school nurse, who is also a licensed clinical social worker and drug counselor, and a resiliency coordinator in conjunction with an outside speaker.

Brunswick school officials are not at the point of making plans for training students because the district is still working on training all administrators and office staff, said Assistant Superintendent Shawn Lambert. Nurses in the district have stocked naloxone in all school buildings for the past two years.

“We’re still trying to focus on getting our staff trained before we get our students trained,” Lambert said. “We’re not against training students, but that’s not our first priority.”

Lambert said he thinks it’s important to train students to use naloxone — the need for the medication is “just a fact of life” — and so far staff members have welcomed the training. But he knows that everyone might not feel the same way.

“When we roll this out to everybody, I’m not sure we’ll have 100% happiness with this,” he said. “There are some preconceived ideas or reactionary ideas about the whole concept of Narcan.”

In addition to naloxone, the schools are also working to finalize training sessions for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and automated external defibrillator to comply with LD 1315, the same law that has mandated naloxone training.