What is a Recovery High School?
Recovery high schools support adolescents recovering from substance use disorders by providing an alternative environment to support their recovery. For students returning to their previous high schools, old peer groups and environments that previously facilitated their substance use present serious obstacles to sustained sobriety.
Recovery high schools provide a fresh start for students, surrounding adolescents with peers who share in the struggles of battling a substance use disorder.
Peers, school staff, and school programming provide support for the student’s recovery process throughout the school day.
Although one of the main missions of recovery schools is to support a student’s recovery from substance use disorders, their primary function is still that of a school.
Recovery schools provide students with the rigorous education they need to develop a vision for themselves that involves a successful future free from addiction and associated behaviors.
Students attending recovery schools engage in a full day of academic courses in addition to time spent in support groups or in individual counseling sessions. Recovery high schools are typically small with student enrollment generally below 125 students. This smaller educational environment allows for schools to provide more individualized instruction for students, also allowing for acceleration or remediation of content as needed on a student-by-student basis.
For students, alumni, and their families, recovery high schools create a path to healing they otherwise may not find anywhere else in society.
What Does a Recovery High School Offer?
Academic Competency
Positive Peer Culture
Holistic Recovery Support
Family Support
Social and Community Support
Alternative Peer Support Groups
A place for students to feel truly accepted for who they are
"If you talk to kids in recovery, they will tell you the first time they felt truly accepted for who they are and not necessarily singled out for having a substance use disorder is when they arrived at a recovery school.
They're surrounded by a bunch of kids who feel similar to them and they feel like they can understand them and they can be themselves."
- A.F.
Who Typically Attends a Recovery High School?
Students with substance use disorders ages 14-21
Students motivated to achieve academically and earn a high school diploma
Students committed to maintaining a recovery lifestyle free of drugs and alcohol
Accountability at Recovery High Schools
Unlike a traditional school, if a student relapses and comes back to their recovery school on Monday morning, they will find a lot of support and accountability.
At a traditional school, either no one would know they used, there wouldn't be accountability, or the people who do know may be celebrating it. There is a different sense of acceptance around drug using in standard schools. The downward spiral for students can go really fast.
So that's the role the recovery school plays.
It's not just helping someone be clean and sober, but to provide support, because it's naive to think that a teenager isn't going to struggle.
In addition to the peer group, the staff—not just the recovery counselors at recovery schools—are a huge source of support, because they, too, are committed to the students' recovery. With the help of smaller class sizes, teachers are able to be very in tune with the students.
As we know, just like any other sort of peer model, people learn from each other, from other people in their like circumstances.
That's a service recovery schools can provide: Kids giving back to kids.
What is Abstinence Focused Recovery?
This is a process of change focused on substance use abstinence, through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential.
Creating a new path for healing and accountability
“When you’re a kid and you’re doing the wrong thing, your parents don’t trust you anymore and, I didn’t have trust anywhere in my life until I went to [a recovery high school], and it was like, here are all these people who think like me, feel like me, and have gone through the same things as me.”
- S.E.