Three public school students in Montgomery County, Maryland, overdosed while at school in recent months and were revived with the drug Narcan, the school system says.
Montgomery County Public Schools held a demonstration at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville Tuesday to show how to use the life-saving opioid antidote.
"We’re gonna support the neck. The head goes back a little bit. You take this with your thumb on the plunger, put it in the nose," a school nurse said while demonstrating how to administer Narcan.
All of the county's public schools carry Narcan, and MCPS said it's working to get more of the nasal spray kits for high schools.
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"We’re now seeing that there are students who are not doing drugs by themselves. … So we want to make sure we are ready and prepared to save multiple lives if needed," said Mark Hodge, senior administrator for school health services for the Montgomery County Health Department.
School officials said they want all families to understand the dangers of opioids like fentanyl.
"It is so powerful in small amounts and is showing up in places where people might not even know that that’s what they’ve ingested," said Dr. Patricia Kapunan, the chief medical officer for MCPS.
That’s what happened to Whitman High School student Landen Hausman, who died in January.
His dad, Marc Hausman, said Landen took a fake Percocet pill that was laced with fentanyl.
"Having your dad and your brother find you dead on your bathroom floor is not how anyone wants to go. He didn’t want to die," Marc Hausman told News4 in April.
The issue of opioid use isn't exclusive to Montgomery County.
In Prince George's County, three students have died of suspected fentanyl overdoses in recent months, police said.
Police in Prince William County, Virginia, said Friday that three teens overdosed on fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills. One student died.
Fentanyl deaths have skyrocketed in the past 20 years in Maryland from 29 deaths in 2012 to more than 2,300 in 2021.
