At least two Connecticut school districts will train staff, including nurses and teachers, to use Narcan after a 13-year-old died of a fentanyl overdose last week.
Narcan is the brand name of a nasal spray that administers naloxone, a medication that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose in an emergency situation.
New Britain’s school district said in a Jan. 15 Facebook post that “with the help of New Britain EMS, trainings will be coming to New Britain schools so that they will all be equipped with Narcan.”
Outreach specialist Rachel Bolton displays a dose of Narcan outside the Access Drug User Health Program drop in center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 31, 2020. (Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
“Training will begin with administrators and eventually expand to teachers and the health curriculum,” the school district said.
Hartford’s school district “has decided to have Narcan (Naloxone) available in every elementary, middle, and high school,” HPS director of communications and marketing John Fergus told Fox News Digital. “We will begin supplying Narcan (Naloxone) to all schools in the district soon. The supplies have been ordered and will be distributed to schools once they are received.”
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Fergus added that the “HPS Health Services Department began providing Narcan training sessions for HPS school nurses, health clinic staff, and other administrative and school support staff this week.
Authorities were called to The Sports and Medical Sciences Academy in Hartford last Thursday and found an unconscious boy at the school upon arrival. Officials administered CPR on the scene and then transported the boy to a nearby hospital, where he died two days later, as FOX 61 Hartford reported at the time.
Sport and Medical Sciences Academy
(Google Maps)
Officials decontaminating classrooms at the magnet school found “one wipe sample, in one room … with a detectable level of fentanyl,” Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez said in a letter to families, according to FOX 61.
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“The detectable level in this one room was 0.12 (the detectable reporting limit is 0.10). All other areas tested found no detectable levels,” she said.
The deceased 13-year-old was one of three students exposed to the drug after one of those students reportedly brought 40 bags of the deadly drug to school, NBC Connecticut reported.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin speaks during a Jan. 19 press conference. (Facebook)
“This drug is enormously powerful, it is poisonous, and it is showing up more and more often, not just here but in communities across the state and in communities across the country in higher concentrations, with higher potency, and that means with higher toxicity and danger. And as a community, our first focus now is on supporting the school community,” Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said during a Wednesday press conference.
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Connecticut’s education department will send out a survey to determine how many school nurses have received training to administer Narcan.
“The … death of a student affects the entire statewide school ecosystem, and we all mourn this unnecessary and untimely death with heavy hearts,” Connecticut Commissioner of Education Charlene Russell-Tucker said Wednesday. “Schools are meant to be safe places and spaces for learning, for friendships, for achievements, for growth. … And as a statewide community, we must continue all our efforts to keep illegal drugs out of our schools.”
