ATLANTA — Safety equipment in schools all over metro Atlanta includes something you might be surprised is even needed: A drug to help save lives.
For Pamela Dieguez, the pain of losing someone to a fentanyl overdose is all too real.
Her sister Mia went to DeKalb County’s Dunwoody High School and took a pill that looked like Percocet. She passed out in the classroom.
“It was like 12 p.m. when I got the phone call that she was getting rushed to the hospital. They didn’t tell me why or what happened until I got to the hospital. They put me into a room and told me that she didn’t make it, that she died in the classroom,” Dieguez told Channel 2’s Linda Stouffer.
“And now you know it was fentanyl in the pills?” Stouffer asked Dieguez.
“Yes,” Dieguez said. “They have it on cameras where they went, and she went into the restroom, came back, got to the classroom, and she was gone.”
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“You can’t look at something to see if it’s safe. You can’t smell something to see if it’s safe. And that’s the tragedy about these fentanyl overdoses,” Fulton County Schools Health Services Director Lynne Meadows said.
Meadows told Stouffer that schools have to quickly determine what’s causing a medical emergency.
They started supplying Narcan in 2019 and designed safety kits for Fulton’s campuses
“All of our schools have the same white box with the same picture because as we train, we want all of them to be able to look for the same thing,” Meadows said. “And then inside first thing has the Narcan. So, you can see it’s a two-pack.”
Narcan is a nasal spray so powerful, it could potentially save someone overdosing. But it has to be close enough to use it within minutes.
“We keep this in all of our clinic areas. Our school police officers also carry a dose, and all of our registered nurses,” Meadows said.
Stouffer went to Heards Ferry Elementary to see how the school nurse stocks a “go” box. Inside are the instructions for Narcan, along with first aid supplies for an emergency anywhere on campus.
Recently, the Fulton County district had scares with edibles and gummies.
“For us, not knowing what we’re in, those edibles and the students not knowing what’s in those edibles, so those have been some close calls,” Meadows said.
A new Georgia law now requires Naloxone, or Narcan, at all public schools.
Channel 2 Action News reached out through Open Records Requests to five metro Atlanta school districts to find out how many times staff or police, and first responders have used the drug.
Cobb County Schools did not provide details. Atlanta Public Schools has no instances. Fulton County Schools had one.
In Gwinnett County schools, Narcan has been used four times. DeKalb County Schools needed it three times, including at Dunwoody High School, where responders tried to revive Mia with the overdose-reversing drug, but it was too late.
“Please realize we’re losing so many young people who have, like a big future ahead of them,” Dieguez said. “I lost my sister because of that. She was going through something and the seller knew she was sad and she wanted the pills, and they gave it to her without realizing what was in them. I wish I could have done more, and she would have been here.”
Studies show overdose deaths are starting to drop overall, but are spiking in young people.
Kids are buying counterfeit pills online and from each other. They often look like the real deal. But with fentanyl mixed in, they can be deadly.
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