By Michaela Peterson, Chuckie Copeland, and Aaron Watson-Sharer
As most people know, drugs are an ongoing issue in American with a lot of angles. . On one hand, drug use continues to cause major disruption in our society. For example, 46.6% of inmates in federal prisons are there because of drug related offenses (Source). On the other hand, certain states are seeking to decriminalize or even legalize the use of certain substances. What do these trends mean at the high school level?
When SLAMedia started talking about student drug use, we had the vague impression that everyone at SLA at least knows a student who regularly uses some form of illegal drugs. But was this perception real? SLA Media wanted to find out exactly how many students do what, when, and how much. We formed a group of three students — Michaela Peterson, Chuckie Copeland, and Aaron Watson-Sharer — to be our Spotlight team. These students have spent the 2 months creating and tallying school wide anonymous survey and analyzing the resulting data. In total, 290 students were surveyed from all four grades.
In this article, we will go over some of the information we have found. For the rest of the school year, we will be reporting out about various drug related issues in the school. Below we have put together an infographic of some of the basics.
We hope that this information gives the school community some hard facts which may challenge (or confirm) their assumptions about student drug and alcohol use. As always, we seek to present the facts as plainly as possible.
For the remainder of the school year, we will be publishing various articles about this issue. We will be interviewing people about their experience with drugs at SLA, and how they think it affects the school.
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