Heroin addiction sweeping through Orange County

Jackee was 16 when she smoked it for the first time. It was the summer of her sophomore year and her boyfriend asked her if she wanted to get loaded with some other kids. She had already been smoking methamphetamine on-and-off for three years, so trying heroin didn’t seem like a big deal to her.

“I thought about it for like five seconds,” the 18-year-old Yorba Linda resident says. “And then I thought, ‘Eff it. Why not?’”

As she sat in her boyfriend’s car, Jackee watched one of the teens press the “sugar” to the foil. He lit a match beneath the foil and held it as Jackee sucked the smoke through a hollowed out pen.

She took five hits, drawing the smoke in deep each time, taking care not to waste any. When she was done, she lay back on the grass next to her boyfriend and stared at the sky. She felt invincible.

Those skies darkened quickly. Jackee began smoking heroin daily, using greater quantities as her tolerance increased. Within weeks she had developed a $200-a-day habit that she would go to any lengths to feed.

Jackee is not alone. Her story is becoming all too familiar in the tidy tracts and upscale enclaves of Orange County, where a wave of teen heroin use has left authorities and parents grappling for answers.

At Touchstones, an adolescent residential treatment facility in Orange, program director Patti Ochoa says three out of 16 clients are primary heroin users, a figure she calls “unusually high.”

At Twin Town Treatment Center, an adolescent outpatient treatment center in Los Alamitos, the figure is higher: two out of five of their 13 to 17-year-old clients now cite heroin addiction upon admission.

Primary counselor Chris Logan says heroin, “seems to be the thing to do right now.” These are not street kids, he stresses, but kids from middle-income families.

At Alternative Options, an intensive outpatient treatment facility in Placentia, administrators say they rarely had heroin addicts at their facility a year ago. Today, six out of ten clients are being admitted with heroin addiction. The majority are females between 15 and 18 years old.

Sean Hogan, assistant professor of social work at Cal State Fullerton, says figures like those are considerably high for any population, not just teens. According to government statistics, approximately 5 percent of adolescents are admitted to treatment with heroin dependence, with most admitted with a marijuana-use disorder.

“Even if you back out those reporting marijuana as their primary drug of choice at admission, you still only get about 10 percent of adolescents reporting heroin as their primary drug of choice,” Hogan says.

Experts say that low cost, availability and the high that smoking heroin produces are fueling this new wave of young users.

According to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials, the heroin being trafficked from Mexico to Orange County is primarily black tar heroin and, to a lesser extent, Mexican brown. The low cost and increased availability of high purity heroin that can be snorted or smoked rather than injected with a needle makes it attractive to teens.

At Alternative Options, most of their teen clients begin using drugs “right out of grandma’s medicine cabinet,” program coordinator Linda Bates says. They progress to heroin when their Vicodin or Percocet habit becomes too expensive. She notes that prescription drugs often run $20 a pill or more, whereas a bag of heroin is fairly cheap.

“Many of these kids save up their lunch money and money mom gives them to buy heroin,” Bates says. “Ten dollars at a time – that’s enough to buy a small amount. You can get more for your money with the heroin.”

She says what teens don’t realize is that with heroin, addiction can be almost instant – usually right after their first use.

When teen addict Jackee smoked heroin for the first time, she wanted to use again right away.

“I thought, ‘This can’t be what everyone’s addicted to. It wasn’t even that great – I got sick!’ But I stopped getting sick after a while and I liked the numb feeling it gave me,” she said.

It wasn’t long before Jackee was using heroin daily – about eight or nine balloons a day, she said, adding that a balloon costs about $25 in Yorba Linda. She started dating a dope dealer who brought her free heroin. She also had a part time job so she was able to buy balloons on her own.

Jackie began doing anything to get her dope.

“I was ditching school to get heroin. I would have heroin dealers bring me my dope at the campus because I would be kicking (having withdrawals) at school, lying in the bathroom stalls puking and shaking,” she said.

She stole money from her family and her employer. She volunteered for the snack shack at little league baseball games, stuffing twenties into her pockets when nobody was looking. She stole money and iPods from backpacks in the girls’ locker room at school.

“This one guy I knew had over $100,000 from his parents’ deaths,” Jackee recalled. “He was a heroin addict so I immediately became his friend and flirted with him and slept with him because he fed me heroin.”

When Jackee’s parents took her to a hospital detoxification unit six months after her first use, she weighed 98 pounds, her hair was falling out in clumps and she couldn’t last a day without heroin. Stories like hers are not unusual, according to Tammie Skonseng, a counselor at Alternative Options, who explained that heroin addicts will beg, borrow and steal to get their drugs.

“Even if they have to sell their body, they will do it. We don’t find that with someone who is drinking or someone who is doing meth, but (heroin addicts) have to have it because they will be so sick without it.”

The Orange County city of Placentia has been hit exceptionally hard by heroin use. There, police department officials say heroin arrests have shot up 150 percent in the past 12 months, primarily among 16 to 23-year-olds.

Police Sgt. Kelly Kenehan, who supervises the Special Enforcement Detail for gangs, vice and narcotics, has been involved in nearly two dozen heroin-related arrests involving teens and young adults in the past six months. In response to the growing problem, his unit has stepped up street enforcement, especially in the hard-hit north end of the city.

In September, law enforcement seized 100 pounds of Mexican brown heroin in adjacent Anaheim, believed to be one of the largest heroin seizures in California. But that has failed to stem the flow of the narcotic into Placentia.

“Some of the search warrants that we’ve done and arrests we’ve made show that people are driving up to LA anywhere from two to five days (a week) to pick up and distribute it within our city,” Kenehan said, noting that heroin is readily available outside the high schools and the streets that surround them.

In November, a 17-year-old Placentia boy nearly died from a heroin overdose. Since then, Kenehan’s department has fielded calls from anxious parents asking about symptoms and paraphernalia associated with heroin use.

“Parents are freaking out,” Alternative Options’ Bates agrees, adding that most find it hard to believe the drug their child is using is heroin.

“But addiction is addiction. It’s bad with any drug, but we just don’t think of heroin as something that’s available here in Orange County in the high schools,” she says.

She cautions parents to pay attention to what their teen is doing.

“I think awareness is a big thing right now,” Bates says. “I think the community needs to get together and be aware. And watch. Because there’s a big thing going on.”

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This article originally appeared on The Daily Titan.

Despite State Subsidies, Class Sizes Begin to Rise Again in California Schools

Most of California’s largest school districts are increasing class sizes in kindergarten through third grade, eroding the most expensive education reform in the state’s history.

California Watch surveyed the 30 largest K-12 school districts in the state and found that many schools are pushing class sizes to 24 in some or all of the early grades. Other districts have raised class sizes to 30 students – reverting to levels not seen in more than a decade.

The changes at more than two-thirds of the districts surveyed have parents and teachers concerned that the academic performance of millions of children will suffer. California already ranks 48th in the nation in terms of student to teacher ratios.

And new measures are in place that will allow districts statewide to raise class sizes even higher and still receive more than $1 billion in state aid — money that was originally intended to reward schools that kept class sizes low.

The class-size reduction program was adopted 13 years ago with much fanfare. Its goal was to bring the state’s overcrowded K-3 classrooms down to a maximum of 20 students for every teacher in the lower grades. As an incentive to participate, Sacramento gave school districts a generous annual subsidy for every child – now $1,071 per child.

Carol Kocivar, California PTA’s president-elect, said that adding just four students more than the base level of 20 represents a significant increase.

“When you start inching up above 20, kids don’t get the individual attention they need,” she said.

The state has invested about $22 billion in direct subsidies into reducing class size, including $1.8 billion this school year. This is on top of billions more that individual school districts have had to pay to cover the full costs.

The program was rooted in research from other states that showed students in smaller classrooms were more successful academically.

Even though the state never implemented measurements to track the academic impact of class-size reduction, the program has been enormously popular among parents and teachers. Yet because of the state’s budget crisis, school officials are finding it harder than ever to sustain.

That’s the case in both the Mount Diablo Unified School District, in Contra Costa County, and the San Jose Unified School District. In Orange County’s Capistrano Unified School District, second and third grade classes have grown to an average of 30.5 students. In Los Angeles, which enrolls 10 percent of California’s students, K-3 class sizes are creeping up to 24 in many schools.

“In better times it is something that should be protected, but in the times we are in, it is not something we can afford to continue,” said Don Iglesias, San Jose’s superintendent, noting that raising class sizes to 30 will save his district $4 million this year alone.

At Oliveira Elementary School, in a quiet residential neighborhood of Fremont, kindergarten teacher Cheryl Accurso is adjusting to a 30-student classroom for the first time in her 11-year career.

“My worry is that with 30 kids in the class, I won’t be able to reach out and touch, and get to every child in my classroom,” she said. “When they come in the morning, I make sure I tap them on the shoulder or pat them on the head, and say their names, so that there is at least one time when I know I can get to all the children.”

California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O’Connell, who authored the class-size-reduction legislation when he was a state senator, said that it is no accident that elementary school students in recent years have achieved significant academic gains.

“That is now in jeopardy because we have so many school districts walking away from class-size reduction,” he said.

For most of the program’s existence, schools lost the entire subsidy if the average class size hit 21. That has proved to be a powerful incentive for schools to participate. All but about a dozen of the state’s 883 eligible districts have done so.

The state Legislature has designated lower class sizes as a top priority for education spending. The program was one of a handful that escaped the budget axe this year.

At the same time, however, lawmakers acted earlier this year to make it easier for schools to abandon the program. The move allows school districts to raise K-3 classes to as high as 31 students on average — at least for the next three years. Schools that raise the class size above 25 can still receive 70 percent of the subsidies they have received in the past. In past years, K-3 classes of 22 or more students would have been denied state funding through the program.

In theory, school districts could spend more than $1.2 billion of the $1.8 billion set aside for the program on classes with 25 or more students.

Rick Simpson, deputy chief of staff to Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, and her chief adviser on education policy, said lawmakers are hoping the popularity of the program will force school districts to keep class sizes small, despite reducing the penalties for exceeding the 20-student cap. He said the goal was to give school districts more flexibility in how they spend class-size reduction funds, something they have sought for years.

But former Gov. Pete Wilson, who initiated class-size reduction when the state enjoyed a budget surplus in 1996, said the recent changes “totally defeat the purpose of the program. If you get 70 percent of the funds for doing nothing, where is that money going? It is not accomplishing the purpose for which the program was devised.”

One purpose was to bring California’s class sizes down — to get them in line with those of other states. That did happen in the elementary grades. But by 2007, California had larger student-teacher ratios than every state except Utah and Arizona across all 12 grades.

Larger K-3 class sizes now threaten to push California even further behind.

“Having the largest class size in America is a crime and a shame,” said Delaine Eastin, the former superintendent of public instruction who oversaw the implementation of the class-size-reduction initiative until 2002.

It is not only poor districts that are affected. In fact, in some cases, districts serving large numbers of low-income and minority students have benefited from the additional $1.25 billion in Title 1 stimulus funds California receives from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

And nearly 500 of the state’s lowest-performing schools are still receiving funds from the Quality Education Investment Act, passed by the Legislature in 2007. These funds have allowed school districts like Los Angeles to maintain some of their K-3 class sizes at previous levels. The Fremont Unified School District has so far been able to keep class sizes to 20 in the first, second and third grades. But in kindergarten, enrollments have risen to 30.

This year, at Oliveira Elementary, Accurso has her students sitting in groups of six, at five tables, instead of groups of four, at five tables, as in previous years. Across the yard, one of the bungalows brought to the school when the class-size reduction program began in 1996, now stands empty.

But Accurso isn’t nostalgic about the smaller class sizes.

“My focus is on the 30 kids I have in front of me and what I can do for each of them,” she said. “I can’t be thinking about what might have been. I can’t go there.”

She says she is managing with the extra kids – in part because she gets help from another teacher for about two hours, as well as parent volunteers. “We’re just worried that we won’t be able to get them where they need to be at the end of the year,” she said.

In Los Angeles, each of the district’s 524 elementary schools could choose between retaining all their teachers and keeping class sizes low – or laying off teachers and keeping support staff such as school nurses, math coaches and “intervention coordinators.” At Plummer Elementary in the San Fernando Valley, principal Angel Barrett, made the painful choice to let go seven of the school’s first and second year teachers, out of a teaching staff of 45. As in many schools across Los Angeles, her classrooms are more crowded this year.

“You guys are doing a great job at listening,” Norma Plascencia, a teacher with 22 years of classroom experience, told her 24 second-graders on a recent morning, before launching into a lesson about family trees.

“It doesn’t make it impossible to teach, it just makes it harder,” she said. Plascencia said she and other teachers are doing much more advance planning to take into account the extra students. “We are not mass-producing items; we’re not making shoes or pizza. We are dealing with human beings — so four extra bodies are not just four extra bodies — it is everything that comes with them, or doesn’t come with them.”

Will it affect how her students will do this year?

“It better not,” she said. “You have to assume they can reach for the stars. Are some going to fall by the wayside? We’ll find out this year. Is there a possibility? Yes, I think there is.’’

Her comment points to the controversy that has so far been waged mostly in academic circles – whether class-size reduction makes a difference in boosting student performance. Dominic Brewer, a USC professor, said there is no compelling research showing that class-size reduction results in improved academic performance in California. What research does exist has typically been done in other states and in classrooms with even smaller enrollments than in California.

“A class of 20 may be terrible for an ineffective teacher,” he said. “And a great teacher can do great things with 30.”

Some education leaders who have been lukewarm about the program are now making the case that the funds could be better used.

“I don’t think 20-to-1 is sacred,” said L.A. schools Superintendent Ramon Cortines. More important, he said, “is the kind of quality time you spend with your students, and how you divide your time in the classroom.” To tackle high drop-out rates, he believes the real need is for smaller classes in middle and high schools, where class sizes in his district have soared to 40 and higher in some schools.

San Jose’s Iglesias said that even if the state’s economy rebounds, he’s not sure he’d put money back into the class-size-reduction program. “I’d put it into longer school days or Saturday classes rather than this,” he said.

But California superintendent O’Connell doesn’t share any of these concerns. He said his experience as a teacher in Ventura County convinced him of the merits of smaller classes.

The same goes for Doug Wheeler, a veteran kindergarten teacher in San Pablo, just north of Richmond, who said that the larger the class, the more difficult it is for teachers to “deliver the goods.” This year he volunteered to take more students into his bilingual class rather than having some of them be cut from the program. He now has 27 students.

“Teaching is not just standing in front of the class and delivering a lesson,” he said. “It’s about working with kids who are in danger of falling far behind. To get really good results, it has to be one on two, or even one on one.”

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This story was edited by Editorial Director Mark Katches and copy edited by William Cooley.

This article is part of a new collaboration between New America Media and California Watch, a new nonprofit journalism project at the Center for Investigative Reporting. California Watch has multimedia material to accompany this article on its website.