Addiction Proofing Your School: Your Substance Use Policy Is Not the Whole Job
Every independent school has a substance use policy. Most were written for a supply that no longer exists, and they live in a handbook nobody reads out loud.
In a recent episode of The Table, the podcast from The Deans’ Roundtable, I talked with Kriya Lendzion, a licensed addictions clinician and prevention specialist who has spent more than 30 years with teenagers and delivered staff development to tens of thousands of educators worldwide. She was a New England boarding school kid herself, and she’s direct about where that went: rehab at 19, surrounded by adults who cared about her and didn’t know how to intervene.
Her frame for this work is addiction proofing, and it isn’t a curriculum you buy. It’s an audit of what your school already does.
Key takeaways
- Kriya Lendzion says the substances haven’t just increased, they’ve changed form, so adult experience from twenty years ago is a poor guide.
- Staff development is the entry point, because the adult a student trusts is rarely the one who’s been trained.
- A policy should say why it exists, be specific, get reviewed annually, and include amnesty.
- Belonging is a protective factor, which makes weekend programming and gathering rules part of your prevention system.
The substances changed, and most adults on campus were never told
Her point isn’t that students are using more. It’s that they’re using something else.
The plant she encountered in high school in the late 1980s ran roughly 4 percent THC, she said. The modified plant now runs 25 to 35 percent, and the concentrates that go into a cartridge or a dab start around 50 percent and climb toward 90. At those levels, she said, it functions as a hard drug, and adolescent brains aren’t built to hold it.
Nicotine went the same way. She described devices that pair with a phone, play games, keep a little digital pet alive when a kid hits them, and sell for under twenty dollars.
None of that is news to a health center. It’s news to most of the faculty, and that gap is the actual problem, because the adult a student opens up to is usually a coach or an advisor. If we don’t know what’s out there, Kriya Lendzion said, we can’t really care about it yet. That’s why she starts with staff development. Once faculty are informed, they start advocating for the student piece themselves.
The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem
She keeps running into this pattern. A student presents with depression. Parents get called, suicidal thinking is named, treatment gets arranged, and nobody in that entire sequence asks what the student’s THC use looks like.
Mental health and substance use are intertwined in both directions, she said, pointing to research she cites on sharply elevated rates of psychotic disorders among adolescents using regularly.
We do this from the other direction too. We decide we already know what the issue is, so we launch into solutions before we’ve asked what’s actually happening. Same failure, different door.
What a school substance use policy actually needs to do
Kriya Lendzion does policy work with schools, and the gaps she named were consistent:
- Say where it comes from. Science and care, tied to the school’s mission and to student wellbeing, not prohibition language. Otherwise it reads to a teenager as adults trying to control them.
- Be specific, and review it annually. Adolescents read a policy looking for the hole, and parents get behind the hole once it’s found.
- Read it out loud with students. Ask what they already know about it and why they think it exists. They aren’t reading it themselves.
- Make the information pathway explicit. Who gets told, when, and how, across counseling, health, administration, parents, and law enforcement. Some states require private schools to involve law enforcement, she said, naming North Carolina.
- State what discipline is for. Learning from mistakes, accepting responsibility, staying healthy and safe. If you don’t name the intention, everyone assumes punishment.
- Include amnesty, or safe haven. Students need a way to raise a concern about a friend or themselves without it converting into a disciplinary action. Don’t call it a sanctuary policy, she said, since that language belongs elsewhere.
On one-strike rules she’s unsparing. She says there’s no evidence they keep students from developing problems, that they mostly teach kids to be sneakier, and that they contradict what the school says about caring for children. What she wants instead is a wraparound response: increasing interventions, parents involved, consequences still real. Connection before correction, with the correction still in the room.
Belonging is doing prevention work whether you plan it or not
Students reach for these behaviors to meet one of six needs, she said: dopamine and thrill, belonging and acceptance, confidence and mastery, identity and purpose, control and independence, and coping. Addiction proofing means holding your practices against that list and asking where the holes are.
Which is why belonging isn’t a soft add-on here.
On a campus she worked with recently, student leaders told her there was nothing happening on a weekend more interesting than their phones. The adults could list all the programming. The same students described leftover pandemic rules restricting where they could gather.
When a school controls how students spend time together and then a sports team starts passing around nicotine pouches, the pouches are offering belonging and the school isn’t. Her fix is not more programming. It’s asking the students where the disconnect actually is.
The gap between senior spring and first-year fall
I taught a senior transitions course when I was in schools, so this is familiar territory, though the landscape has moved since. We prepare seniors for study skills, time management, and balancing commitments.
Kriya Lendzion says roughly one in four college students don’t make it back for sophomore year, that mental health is the primary driver of leaving in those first two years, and that substance use climbs as a driver by years three and four. Only a small share of them get help, she says, largely because it’s been normalized around them.
Her own kid’s line stuck with me: I didn’t actually feel peer pressure until I got to college.
Where to start
Addiction proofing isn’t a program you schedule in October. It’s whether the adults in your building know what’s actually out there, whether your policy says why it exists, and whether a struggling student can tell someone before it becomes a file.
That’s student life systems work, and it’s the kind that slides to next year every year. If it’s been sitting on your list since last spring, that’s not a failure of will. You don’t have to do this alone.
Frequently asked questions
What should a school substance use policy include? On The Table, prevention specialist Kriya Lendzion named six things schools most often miss: stating that the policy comes from science and care and connects to the school’s mission, being specific enough that students can’t find a hole in it, reviewing it annually, walking through it out loud with students, making the information pathway explicit across counseling, health, administration, parents, and law enforcement, and including an amnesty or safe haven provision so a student can raise a concern without it becoming a disciplinary action.
Why train all staff on substance use instead of just the health center? Because the adult a student actually confides in is usually a coach, an advisor, or a teacher rather than a clinician. Kriya Lendzion says adults who don’t know what is circulating cannot recognize it or respond to it, and that once staff are informed they begin advocating for student programming themselves.
What does “addiction proofing” mean for a school? Kriya Lendzion uses it to describe auditing a school’s existing practices and policies against the six needs students are trying to meet: dopamine and thrill, belonging and acceptance, confidence and mastery, identity and purpose, control and independence, and coping. The goal is that a student has real ways to meet those needs on campus, so that a vape, a bet, or a drink does not become the thing that works best.
