Students Work to Overcome the Odds of the Opioid Epidemic

Each morning, 74-year-old Virginia Dickerson watches anxiously as two of her great-grandchildren disappear down a dark alley on their way to the school bus. Then she prays that they’ll stay safe, that the youngest one won’t get in trouble, because he “stay in there all the time,” and that they’ll “be saved and be able to support and take care of themselves, and if they get a family, to be able to support the family and not to get on drugs.”

With its popular Hatfield-McCoy Trail snaking through densely treed mountains, trout fishing and have-a-seat-on-my-porch culture, McDowell County could be some sort of utopia if not for the abandoned businesses that outnumber the open ones along its namesake avenue in Welch, the county seat, and its spiraling, two-lane highways so dangerous that churchgoers thank God on Sunday mornings that they made it through the week safely. The county competes with its coalfield neighbors for having the highest unemployment rate in the state. In 2016, it was the county with the highest opioid mortality rate in the nation.

But lately, in the place that for more than 50 years has been the poster child for rural poverty in America, change has been taking hold. Schools have been returned to community control. The four-year graduation rate is up 14 percentage points, from 74 in the 2010-11 school year to 88.3 in 2016, which is above the national average. According to school administrators, teen pregnancies have gone from 64.3 per 1000 births to 52.5 — a nearly 20 percent drop. The county established a juvenile drug court. The county’s dial-up internet service was replaced with high-speed internet in 2014. Students have laptops and access to computers and new books.

The improvements can nearly all be attributed to Reconnecting McDowell, a collaboration among the schools; local, state and federal government agencies; and private entities, including telecommunications, construction and coal-producing businesses, health care providers, teachers unions, and nonprofits. Its partners have put their many political and policy differences aside, pledging to stay as long as needed to help the county “create a new reality,” starting with the lives of its children.