YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com
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NEWS
“I mean, one thing I know about change is we are not going to close the achievement gap without educators.” MARGARET SPELLINGS PRESIDENT-ELECT OF UNC
New Haven Promise award to grow BY MICHELLE LIU STAFF REPORTER New Haven students bound for the University of Connecticut discovered their scholarship fund had grown Tuesday — the same day tuition hikes for the next four years were proposed. Gathered in the black-box theater of the Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School yesterday morning, students and community members, including former New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr., heard UConn President Susan Herbst announce that as of next fall, all New Haven Promise Scholars who attend UConn will receive an additional $5,000 each year in scholarship money from the university.
This partnership between UConn and New Haven Promise is firm. It’s something with the potential to make positive changes. SUSAN HERBST President, University of Connecticut New Haven Promise, a scholarship program that covers up to the full cost of college for highperforming students at city public schools, is funded by Yale and Yale-New Haven Hospital as well as the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and Wells Fargo bank. Herbst said UConn expanded its scholarship, which has sent 132 students to UConn in the last three years, in order to better serve its recipients. “This partnership between UConn and New Haven Promise is firm,” Herbst said. “It’s something with the potential to make positive changes throughout the state of Connecticut, which struggles with one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation.” New Haven Promise Executive Director Patricia Melton ’83 told the crowd Tuesday that UConn’s announcement was delivered in a fitting location: Five years ago New Haven Promise was announced in the same blackbox theater. Melton reminded students that the application for this year’s
scholarships opened Tuesday, jokingly adding that she hoped applicants would crash the organization’s servers with their submissions. Other speakers, like Mayor Toni Harp and University President Peter Salovey, stressed the importance of the partnership between New Haven Promise and UConn, noting that the initiative promotes the success of New Haven students, many of whom come from ethnic-minority backgrounds. At a separate press conference later that day, UConn Chief Financial Officer Scott Jordan unveiled a series of proposed tuition hikes over the next four years. These hikes, which would go into effect next fall if approved by the university’s board of trustees, would increase in-state tuition by approximately 7 percent each year. The Hartford Courant reported Tuesday that in-state tuition would rise from the current figure of $10,524 to $13,799 by fall 2019. Promise Scholars at UConn receive, on average, $14,894 in scholarships and grants each academic year, the organization reports. The current total cost of attendance for a Promise Scholar at UConn amounts to $26,438 per year. New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Garth Harries ’95 asked how many of the students present in the theater Tuesday were applying to UConn. To cheers and applause, almost every student raised their hand. Harries cited the city’s growing high school graduation rates, college matriculation rates and high school retention rates as evidence of NHPS’s promotion of college enrollment through programs like New Haven Promise. Herbst also announced the President to President Scholarship Program Monday, which awards $8,000 over two years to high-performing students who transfer from an in-state community college to UConn. New Haven Promise awarded scholarships to 253 students in the class of 2015 from a pool of 535 applicants. Forty of these students currently attend UConn, and three attend Yale. Contact MICHELLE LIU at michelle.liu@yale.edu .
Accidental drug-related deaths rise BY SARA SEYMOUR STAFF REPORTER
GRAPH CONNECTICUT ACCIDENTAL DRUG INTOXICATION DEATHS
By the end of this month, the Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner’s Office expects that the number of accidental drug-induced intoxication deaths to rise by 22 percent from last year’s rate. The number of deaths due to accidental drug overdose is expected to rise from 558 deaths last year to 679 by the end of this year, and the number of accidental heroinrelated deaths is expected to increase from 325 last year to a projected 387. Between January and September this year, there were 290 heroin-related deaths in Connecticut, and deaths related to other pharmaceutical opioids are also on the rise. The state expects a 95 percent increase in accidental fentanyl-related deaths by the end of the year. The chief medical examiner and professors at the School of Public Health agree that the increase in heroin-related deaths in Connecticut is noteworthy. But different approaches to data collection raise questions about which substances pose the largest problem for Connecticut. Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner James Gill said in the past few years heroin, not other pharmaceutical opioids such as oxycodone, has been the largest problem in the state. But Lauretta Grau — a clinical psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health who collected data on the subject — said the increase in heroin- and morphine-related deaths, as well as pharmaceutical opioid deaths, increased significantly between 2009 and 2014, indicating that drug-abuse problems extend beyond just heroin. And Yale pharmacology professor Robert Heimer GRD ’88 said though he would not describe the increasing number of drug-related deaths as an epidemic, there is a major problem with substance abuse in the United States, and opioids are just the most obvious example of an increase in selfmedication in a substantial portion of the country. “Don’t blame it all on heroin. Heroin is cheaper, but let’s not demonize just heroin, it’s a problem across the board. There’s more deaths that are involving pharmaceutical opioids and heroin,” Grau said. “I don’t think that
700 600
Accidental Intoxication Deaths Heroin in any death Heroin and Fentanyl
500 400 300 200 100 0
2012
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2015 (projected)
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going in and limiting the number of pharmaceutical opioids is the answer either. It’s complicated.” Grau said different methodological approaches were applied to draw conclusions about whether opioids other than heroin are rising at a statistically significant rate. For example, Grau included both accidental deaths and deaths of undetermined causes in her data, whereas the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office only used information regarding accidental intoxication deaths. The drug-related death that has seen the greatest expected percentage increase since last year is combined use of fentanyl and heroin. Fentanyl is a narcotic pain reliever that can be administered transdermally through a patch or an injection, orally or nasally. Last year, toxicology reports detected heroin and fentanyl together in 37 deaths. By September of this year there were already 69 accidental fentanyl and heroin related deaths, and the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office predicts that the number will rise to 92 by the end of the year. These numbers are included in the count of both heroin-related deaths and fentanyl-related deaths. Fentanyl-related deaths generally are expected to increase from 75 last year to 146 by the end of the year, according to data from the Chief Medical Examiner’s
Office. Between January and September this year there were 110 fentanyl-related deaths. “The fentanyl that we are seeing is from illicit fentanyl made in clandestine labs. It is sometimes mixed with heroin but it also can be purchased separately,” Gill said. “As there is no FDA on the street, people addicted to drugs have no guarantees about the dose, quality or composition of drugs that are bought on the street.” Heimer explained that sometimes heroin and fentanyl are cut together to increase the rush that the user experiences. He said longtime heroin users often complain that the quality of their heroin is decreasing, when in reality this perception is due to decreased sensitivity to the substance. Including heroin, the reach of illicit drugs is spreading. “[Illegal opioids are] in all but 17 of the 169 towns in Connecticut. Between 2009 and 2014 all but 17 have experienced at least one overdose of an illegal opioid,” Grau said. “It’s spreading. There are very few communities aren’t affected by it.” Heimer said interpreting numbers around illegal opioid-related deaths has to be done very carefully because many factors could contribute to the increase. He explained that one potential contributor to the spread of drug use is the sale of prescription medica-
tion to suburbanites by people who then buy heroin at a lower price. “It’s a self-arranged substitution therapy,” Heimer said. Heimer said another contributing factor is the increased availability of opioids. He said doctors feel compelled to help patients with symptoms of chronic pain. Because medication is cheaper than physical therapy, doctors have begun to rely more heavily on prescription drugs. All three medical experts agreed that increasing understanding of drug addiction as a disease and destigmatizing it is paramount to countering these increases. “Just like any disease, it affects all social strata and areas of our state. It took decades for medicine and society to recognize that chronic alcoholism is a disease. So is drug abuse,” Gill said in an email to the News. Grau said there needs to be a more coordinated and concerted effort to not just address substance-abuse problems, but also to acknowledge that often those suffering from substance-abuse addiction are also struggle with housing, insurance and other issues that extend beyond simply obtaining treatment. The data from the Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner’s Office was updated Nov. 17. Contact SARA SEYMOUR at sara.seymour@yale.edu .
Harp, Harries set to close achievement gap BY JIAHUI HU STAFF REPORTER Mayor Toni Harp and New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Garth Harries ’95 took a step Tuesday morning toward closing Connecticut’s education achievement gap, which is one of the widest in the country. Harp and Harries signed a letter of intent to bring Citizen Schools — a program that works with public middle schools to give all students additional hours of schooling — to three NHPS schools in the next academic year. Between now and April, the city and Citizen Schools must seek NHPS, community and financial support in order to make the program a reality. The organization will a sign an official contract with the city if they achieve these goals. Citizen Schools, which has reached 5,300 students across seven states, has seen a good deal of success in underprivileged schools since its 1995 launch, Citizen Schools President Emily McCann said. Students who participated in Citizen Schools graduate at a 20 percent higher rate than students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds who did not participate, she said. “Middle school is one of the very best times to influence a child’s life because the brain is really growing,” Harp said. “Citizen Schools has it right. What happens oftentimes in normal education is that middle school is not addressed in a way that takes advantage of children’s time to grow.” The letter of intent is a public commitment to exploring an offi-
cial partnership between the city and Citizens Schools, said Special Advisor to Citizen Schools Nell Kisiel. The program’s flagship concept — extended learning time — aims to close the wide gap between upper- and middle-class children’s access to non-classroom educational enrichment such as music school, language lessons and tutoring. Children from middle- and upper-income backgrounds already benefit from 6,000 additional hours of learning time, compared to peers from lowerincome families, by the time they enter middle school. Students at schools enrolled in Citizen School gain 300 to 400 additional hours of academic support and enrichment programs each year, McCann said. Mentors in the program — community volunteers or recent college graduates in AmeriCorps — lead students in various educational enrichment activities including mock trial, robotics and journalism. The program also helps reinforce the curricula students learn during formal school time. Boston native Vidya Ganga participated in Citizen Schools’ mock trial program during her three years in middle school. Now enrolled in a crime and justice program at Suffolk University, Ganga said Citizen School helped her set the educational goals that enabled her to pursue a legal career. “I worked with lawyers for six weeks and then presented in front of a judge,” Ganga said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I learned that I wanted to be in a
JIAHUI HU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Boston-based education program Citizens Schools could soon come to the New Haven. courtroom, speak and be a lawyer in the future.” NHPS has extended school days with mixed success over the past few years, Harries said, citing student and teacher burnout as obstacles to the initiatives’ success. Citizen Schools is unlikely to face these problems, Harries added. New Haven professionals
will also have the opportunity to share their skills with Citizen Schools students. Laura Pappano — a journalist who founded an after-school journalism club at East Rock Community Magnet School — said Citizen Schools offers a structure that allows local professionals to share their skills, whether they be public speaking, solar-car engineering or com-
puter-program design. Employees at John Hancock Financial in Boston have supported Citizen Schools in their city by teaching a class about the college application process, Hancock Program and Events Coordinator Rita German said. Alexander Donovan SOM ’16, who has taught in public schools with former Citizen Schools
teachers, said the program gives young graduates interested in education a valuable opportunity to get a taste of teaching before committing to the profession. The first Citizen Schools programs were in Boston, Massachusetts. Contact JIAHUI HU at jiahui.hu@yale.edu .