Every weekday at 5280 High School in Denver starts the same way.
Students in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction gather on the steps of the school’s indoor auditorium to discuss a topic chosen by staff members. One recent morning, they talked about mental health and sobriety. A teenage boy dressed in tan corduroys, a black hoodie, and sneakers went first.
“I didn’t want to have, like, any emotion,” he said. “So I thought, like, the best way to, like, put it down would be to do more and more and more drugs.”
A classmate said she started doing drugs for fun and then got hooked. Another student said his addiction negatively impacts his mental health. A third announced an upcoming milestone.
“In, like, two days, I’ll be six months sober,” she said, as her classmates cheered.
The students attend Colorado’s only recovery high school — one of 43 nationwide. These secondary schools are designed for students who are recovering from substance use disorder and might also be dealing with related mental health disorders. The Denver school opened in 2018 as a public charter school that today enrolls more than 100 students annually.
One of those cheering classmates was sophomore Alexis Castillo, 16, who listened supportively during that recent morning meeting. She is in recovery for alcohol and fentanyl addictions. Several of her friends attended the school when she enrolled during her freshman year and initially loved it. But after a while some of Castillo’s friends left and she grew disillusioned. She stopped going to class and wasn’t motivated to work her recovery steps.
“They give you a lot of accountability,” she said. “That was not something I wanted.”
Castillo relapsed and school staffers helped her get into rehab. Three months later she was back at the school, sober and ready to do the work.
The school’s mission is to help kids learn to live a substance-free life while receiving an education.
“They can go on to college or a career and really handle anything that life throws at them,” said 5280’s founder and executive director, Dr. Melissa Mouton.
In 2022, nearly a third of 12th graders and 1 in 5 10th graders reported using an illicit drug in the previous year, according to a national survey from the Monitoring the Future project conducted by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center. Those numbers have steadily decreased over the past 25 years. However, data from UCLA shows overdose deaths among teens doubled in the first year of the pandemic, mainly attributed to the increased prevalence of fentanyl-laced drugs.
The first recovery high school opened in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1979 and similar programs now operate in 21 states. Compared with their peers at regular schools who have gone through treatment, recovery high school students have better attendance and are more likely to stay sober, and their graduation rate is at least 21% higher, according to one study.
“For this particular group of young people who have these disorders, this can be a lifesaver,” said John Kelly, director of the Recovery Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It can help them create a social norm of recovery.”
There are three components to effective drug and alcohol treatment, according to Dr. Sharon Levy, a pediatrician and addiction medicine specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. The first part is medical, which includes seeing a doctor, drug testing, and using medications like buprenorphine to treat opioid addiction. The second is emotional support from counseling to address co-occurring mental health disorders. And there is a behavioral health component that, for kids, can include recovery schools.
“Recovery schools offer an opportunity really for peer support and mutual aid in a kind of a supervised and structured way,” Levy said.
Recovery high schools often weave components of treatment into the school day — activities like 5280’s daily recovery program meeting. In the afternoon, the school offers wellness electives such as basketball and journaling.
