I have a Master’s degree in psychology and counseling, and I’m a licensed clinical mental health counselor, and I work for Child & Family Services. I’ve been working at Child & Family Services for almost five years now.
I’m a program manager and I have the opportunity to be able to supervise staff who are on the direct lines providing a multitude of services to youth, but primarily prevention of substance abuse services to youth that are school-based.
I have three staff who provide services called the Student Assistance Program, and they are based in three different high schools: Portsmouth High School, Students High School in Claremont, and Raymond High School. They provide a wide variety of things that help to prevent and intervene in early substance use with youth and students in the school.
The program provides individual and group-based services where youth who are showing some sort of risk factors like a change in behavior in the school environment—maybe their grades are going down, they’re starting to make choices that are not necessarily choices that they would have made before, their mood is changing, or they’re having difficulty in their family life—all of things which make it so youth are susceptible to starting to use substances.
They have the opportunity to meet with a Student Assistance counselor individually and do some assessment work with them, and then determine whether some supportive group atmosphere would be a good place for them to be able to engage in services within the school.
So the Student Assistance counselor facilitates groups on a wide variety of topics for youth who may have parents who are substance abusing or for youth who may be experimenting with substance use for the first time themselves, or for youth that may just be at risk and are starting to show some signs that might lead them down that path.
Our youth are exposed to substances on a daily basis. I think there’s a lot of people who are really naïve to that fact. They believe that alcohol and other substances are things that youth don’t necessarily have access to, but more and more we see that they are very well accessible to the youth that we serve here in New Hampshire.
We have seen over the past few years with the prevention services here in the state that things like alcohol use and marijuana use are starting to decrease, but there’s other things that are starting to increase, like the use of prescription drugs and over-the-counter medication amongst our young people, so the prevention services need to continue to be able to provide services that are focused on those.
I think one of the main messages that’s important to send is just the fact that our state really brings in a lot of revenue based on the sale of alcohol, and that the services that are being provided are really providing a service much beyond just the idea of substance use to these youth.
The prevention services that these youth are part of really give them a sense of purpose. They allow them to start to understand their sense of worth. They start to understand how to build a future for themselves. They really are looking into their future because of these services, and they have this trusted person within their school building who helps them to be able to deal with all of the other stuff that’s going on in their life that allows them to be able to be successful in school.
So when we take the alcohol fund and provide prevention services and allow these youth to have access to them, we really are investing in the future of our youth. When we take that funding away we’re basically telling the youth of New Hampshire that they don’t matter and that the services that are provided to them don’t matter because we don’t expect them to build a future and that we have no good expectations for them.
That’s a really sad thought, to think that the youth of New Hampshire are getting that message from our Legislature.
