During the 2017-18 school year, the McShin Academy operated out of this building at St. Joseph's Villa. (Photo by Arrman Kyaw)
Cottage 7 in St. Joseph’s Villa, the building that housed McShin Academy for the 2017-18 school year, sat nearly empty on a Friday in June. The two remaining teenagers, DJ and Mitch, were the only students enrolled during the past school year. They were also among the last. The partnership between the McShin Foundation and St. Joseph’s Villa was dissolved on June 14, putting an end to Virginia’s first and only recovery high school, designed to help students overcome substance abuse.
"We felt like we needed 10 kids minimum to be able to float anything when you look at our occupancy charges, the price per teacher and all of that,” says Craig Hedley, director of community partnerships at St. Joseph’s Villa, a Henrico County nonprofit that serves youth with developmental disabilities and mental health issues.
The idea for the academy originated with John Shinholser, president of the McShin Foundation, a nonprofit peer-to-peer recovery program for people with substance-abuse disorders, and Stas Novitsky, a McShin participant-turned-employee, after Novitsky visited a recovery school in Houston.
"I was really inspired by that because a lot of kids from my high school had died over the last few years” from substance abuse-related issues, Novitsky says.
The McShin Foundation, a peer-to-peer recovery program for people with substance-abuse disorders, started the academy with one student in December 2015. It grew to nine by the spring of 2016, then moved that fall from the foundation’s offices to a house across the parking lot lent by Hatcher Memorial Baptist Church.
Former student Christopher Jackson, 17, said the academy, and the relationships he fostered there, offered critical support and kept him away from harmful influences at his previous high school.
“The friends I had were the people that were either going to help me skip school … get me drugs or had connects to different drug dealers,” Jackson says.
Initially, the academy charged students $135 per week, the same amount the McShin Foundation charges participants staying in its recovery houses. At 35 weeks, that would be $4,725. With the move to St. Joseph’s Villa in September 2017, tuition climbed to $16,000 per year.
At the new location, students also received instruction from a teacher employed by St. Joseph’s Villa instead of teachers provided by school systems for homebound students, as was the case when operating at the McShin Foundation. They also had their own building, a gym and a physical education teacher. McShin continued to provide students with peer recovery services.
Though comparable to other local private schools, the tuition proved to be a barrier to some students, says Cliff Jones, McShin’s most recent director of youth and family development. Only one, DJ, remained with the school during the transition.
"I think it's way cheaper than sending your kid to a $40,000, $50,000 treatment center for 30 days,” notes Honesty Liller, the McShin Foundation’s CEO, adding that she understands that the cost leap was “scary.”
Since McShin Academy began operating, 30 students in total have enrolled and nine graduated, she says.
Besides class time and counseling activities, the academy’s recovery and peer-centered curriculum involved going to 12-step meetings and outings that ranged from rock climbing and a summer trip to Virginia Beach to just holding recovery meetings in the park and throwing a football around.
“A lot of the kids in the academy and the staff there, it kind of felt like family to me because we'd gotten so close," Jackson says. “It gave us that trust and responsibility that we didn’t feel like we had in public school.”
Andrew Finch, co-founder of the Association of Recovery Schools, says that financial struggles are common for recovery schools, adding that the smaller sizes of most recovery schools — which he says average around 30 students — lead to higher operating costs.
“Most of the recovery high schools that are out there — we think there's about 40 in operation today — are operating on a shoestring,” Finch says. “If they're receiving public dollars, it's probably just enough to operate. If they're receiving private dollars, they're constantly raising money and they're probably always just trying to stay afloat.”
The majority of recovery high schools exist as, or are founded on partnerships with, public or charter schools. They thereby operate through combinations of tuition and government funding.
McShin Academy lived primarily off of tuition and fundraising because public funding was absent. Finch says that funding model was unreliable for long-term sustainability.
St. Joseph’s Villa currently has no plans to continue the school, says Drew Melson, director of marketing communications. But he said that the nonprofit was looking into other funding sources and was hoping to continue a similar school in the future.
Liller says that, despite having no immediate plans, McShin Academy could reopen at Hatcher Memorial one day.
“It's not out of our radar,” she says. “I don't have a commitment to start [this fall], no. But it's not something I'm going to forget about, either. We did really well with that. And the need is here."
According to the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 1,064,000 people between the ages of 12 to 17, and 5,236,000 people ages 18 to 25, reported having substance use disorders in the past year.
Two and a half years after bringing in his first student, Novitsky now works remotely for the Virginia Center for Addiction Medicine from Kentucky. He is still taken aback by the academy’s demise.
"The crazy thing is there was nothing like it, for like 100 miles around, and still,” Novitsky says. “If a recovery school fails in the middle of the biggest drug epidemic, what the hell happened?"