Clean And Sober

By David Hill

Sarah Mason-Couch, a bright 16-year-old with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, sat at a desk in an empty classroom picking at her lunch, which consisted of leftover pizza, granola, a banana, carrot slices, and celery stalks. The food was neatly packed in a purple Sesame Street lunch box. "Alcohol is my drug of choice,'' she said, as if she were describing her favorite ice cream flavor. "Hard alcohol. Vodka. But I really got into hallucinogens, and I did a lot of over-the-counters, like caffeine pills, Robitussin--anything I could get. It was hard to get alcohol. It was a lot easier to get pot, or acid, or just to drink Robitussin, NyQuil, rubbing alcohol.''

Sarah is a student at Recovery High School in Albuquerque, N.M. Housed in a nondescript brown stucco building not far from the entrance to the city's airport, the school opened three years ago as one of the nation's first public high schools for recovering alcoholics and drug abusers. Although ostensibly part of the Albuquerque Public Schools, Recovery High was established with grant money from the Princeton, N.J.-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Last year, however, the startup money ran out, leaving a wary school district holding the bag. Since then, the school--which currently serves about 75 students in grades 9 through 12--has been hanging on for dear life.

Led by a tireless principal by the name of Jan Hayes, the school offers regular classes, group therapy, and a 12-step recovery program based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. To enroll, students must sign a contract promising to stay clean and sober and to submit to random drug tests. (The school is not set up to handle detoxification.) There's a sort of reverse peer pressure that permeates the place; students who have successfully kicked their habits encourage newcomers...