120 Parents Listen and Talk Drug Awareness at School District Forum

The reason teens don’t share their drug use with their parents is not from fear of punishment, said Coleby Lombardo, a drug counselor at Mira Costa and Redondo Union high schools.

“Kids worry about their parents’ judgment,” Lombardo said.

About 120 parents attended a substance abuse prevention and awareness forum in the Parras Middle School cafeteria Thursday evening, sponsored by the Redondo Beach Unified School District and the Drug and Alcohol Community Task Force.

This was the second year for the forum.

“It was good information,” said Paula Johnson, a parent of two middle school students in the district. “[Hearing] the different names of the drugs and seeing them, that was enlightening.”

Johnson was most impressed by a 17-year-old speaker named Victoria, who began drinking at 10 and is now sober.

“I had no coping skills. I didn’t know how to be comfortable with myself,” Victoria said. Victoria became fascinated with the world of drinking while watching her parents and their friends party. “I wanted to be in on that secret,” she said, recalling that she shut her mother out of her life when she was smoking methamphetamine and now she is extremely close with both parents.

The statistics on drug use at Redondo Union High School and the middle schools aren’t much different than at schools across the state and country, officials said. Relying on the results of the California Healthy Kids Survey, Assistant Superintendent Frank DeSena said about half of the district’s 11^th graders have tried marijuana, and about half said they have had four or more drinks of alcohol.

About 90 percent of both classes say they've never tried methamphetamine.

The number of suspensions for drug use this year seemed consistent with previous years at Adams and Parras middle schools as well as the high school, at least so far, officials noted.

So far this year, 12 students at Adams have received five-day suspensions, two at Parras and 16 at RU.

Some kids as young as 11 have been suspended, DeSena said.

“Their lives are not always rosy,” said DeSena, who encouraged parents to participate in the district’s safe space program.

Students are occasionally expelled for two semesters for selling drugs or repeatedly using, and they must apply for reinstatement, DeSena said.

In 2007-08, four students at RU were expelled, and one at Adams; in 2008-09, two at Adams and one at Parras were expelled; in 2009-10, one was expelled at RU; and 2010-11, one at RU.

Redondo Beach police Sgt. Shawn Freeman said methamphetamine continues to be popular in the South Bay. So is marijuana and Ecstasy and prescription medication. 

“For middle school students, it’s going to be harder for them to get the methamphetamine and cocaine, simply because of the money issue,” Freeman said. “You’ve got to have the money.”

Middle school students doing drugs often do what they can get their hands on, including marijuana and inhalants, Freeman said.

Freeman, who has worked as an undercover narcotics officer and is now in charge of investigations at the Redondo police department, encouraged parents to search their children’s bedrooms. Freeman said parents have purchased safes for their children and don’t know the combination, which means they can’t know what’s being stored.

An officer can search a child’s room in the home “as long as you [a parent] can go into that room,” said Freeman, who showed parents sealed samples of different drugs.

Parents were encouraged to connect with their children and find out what’s going on in their lives, which might forego the need to involve the police.

Greg Allen, a counselor and former program director of the Thelma McMillen Center for Chemical Dependency Treatment at Torrance Memorial Hospital, said kids dodge parents but parents are the ones who often don’t want to have a conversation about drugs with their children.

“The home environment needs to be a place where the kids are accepted and it’s safe,” Allen said. “No one wants to talk to someone who will freak out on them. You can freak out on the inside, but you have to create an environment so they can talk to you.”

Allen said parents must find a way to stay connected to their child, even some topic of conversation like a video game.

Parents sometimes take drugs or drink to cope, and their children learn that behavior. Allen encouraged parents to find a way that’s not destructive to deal with their own stress. The hard fact is, most kids don’t want the lifestyle of their parents, Allen said.

Kids used to take drugs to be cool and fit in, and that still happens, Allen said. But today, young people feel they're under a lot of pressure.

“A lot of our kids are stressed out,” Allen said. “The main reason kids use is to deal with stress, to relax.”

“We don’t know how to relax,” Allen said. “Kids need to learn how to play and have fun.”

After the presentations, parents commented that drug use at Perry Park seems prevalent, and Freeman acknowledged that the police department has increased patrols in that area because of calls. Freeman encouraged parents to call the department right away if they see drug use in public, not 30 minutes later.

Parents also commented on the tricky balance of expressing disapproval over drug use while also maintaining a respectful manner in a conversation with their kids.

Afterward, a mother of a daughter and son said she got a lot out of the forum.

“My kids do the right kinds of things, but I still wonder if my son does drugs. He’s kind of a follower, wants to fit in, peripheral to the people he admires,” she said.

She said she received some courage from the conversation at the forum to log into her son’s Facebook account because she knows the password.

“My kids are great kids now. Will they always be?” she said, adding that she regularly attends school district events and Thursday’s forum was “one of the most impressive things I’ve seen Redondo [schools] do,” she said.

Lombardo, the RU and Costa drug counselor who spoke at the forum, grew up in Manhattan Beach but at 19 was living out of his car and weighing 94 pounds. He reminded parents that drugs do in fact provide teens with something they think they need.

“Drugs give us access to what we feel we’re missing inside,” Lombardo said.