Some Schools Will Get Money From Opioid Settlements

Some Schools Will Get Money From Opioid Settlements—But It Won’t Be Easy

Some school districts stand to benefit from the recent state and local settlements in lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors—but actually getting those funds will take considerable time and effort.

Many district leaders and experts contend that major companies like Purdue Pharma and McKinsey, as well as retail pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens, are among the parties responsible for the opioid crisis, which has forced schools to ramp up costly special education services and overdose-prevention initiatives. Dozens of districts have signed on to class-action lawsuits against these companies and made the case for billions of dollars in compensation.

But schools face a steep uphill climb to extract substantial funds from lawsuit settlements around the devastating effects of the opioid crisis, said Sara Whaley, a research associate for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health who tracks opioid settlement funds and advocates for maximizing their impact.

“It sounds like a lot of money,” Whaley said. “But when you actually get how much is going to a school system from this larger settlement, it’s not a lot.”

In Florida, the state attorney general is trying to convince a judge to block hospitals and the Miami-Dade school district from receiving funds from settlement agreements for state and local governments. In Oregon and Rhode Island, school districts designated to receive funds don’t know how much they’re getting or how to apply.

And in many states, schools are still pursuing litigation of their own, which could take years to resolve. McKinsey in October announced it was entering into settlement negotiations with districts and local governments, but those have not been resolved, according to lawyers representing districts.

The Minnetonka district in Minnesota, for instance, is still waiting to hear whether it will prevail in a lawsuit alongside other districts against numerous pharmaceutical companies involved in the proliferation of opioids. In the meantime, Minnesota state lawmakers passed a bill last year authorizing a $300 million settlement with four pharmaceutical companies (Johnson and Johnson, McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen) that prohibits anyone in the state, including the Minnetonka district, from suing those companies again.

“We continue to maintain the stance that school districts have suffered unique impacts related to the opioid crisis,” said JacQui Getty, a spokesperson for the district. “We are not supportive of a decision that ignores this fact.”

Many districts continue to fight for a bigger piece of the fiscal pie, their lawyers argue, because they’re central players in the fight to eradicate the opioid epidemic.

“We believe that school districts can be the superstar of abatement” of the opioid crisis, said Wayne Hogan, a civil trial lawyer who’s among the attorneys representing districts in numerous states in the fight over the costs of the opioid epidemic. “Every time a school district saves a kid’s life, they don’t drop out, they stay out of the criminal justice system, that has a multiplier effect on the rest of the government services.”

An ongoing crisis strains schools’ wallets and operations

The proliferation of deadly opioids nationwide in recent decades has sparked an ongoing public health emergency in many communities. In 2021 alone, more than 80,000 Americans died of overdoses involving opioids, including fentanyl.

The scourge has strained schools in a variety of ways. Opioid addiction in pregnant women heightens the risk of neonatal abstinence syndrome, which can cause permanent developmental disabilities in children and ramp up already-enormous mandatory costs for special education in schools. School staff have also been tasked with monitoring for signs of opioid abuse among students and providing prevention programs and resources for students.

The national landscape of opioid litigation is vast and complex. Here are some key highlights:

In the last two years, all 50 states and the District of Columbia reached settlement agreements with McKinsey, the consulting firm that used its federal connections to supercharge marketing efforts for deadly opioids. Some of those agreements included language that precludes anyone in the state, including school districts, from suing the company in the future over related issues. All told, the settlement funds total $50 billion. A spokesperson for McKinsey told Education Week in an email that the company believes the settlements “resolve claims that may be brought by municipalities or school districts.”

Several states, including California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, have settled multi-million dollar lawsuits with pharmacy retailers like CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens.

More than five dozen school districts are involved in lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors that directly tackle the crisis’s effects on special education funding.

Each state takes a different approach to divvying up the settlement funds it receives from these lawsuits, Whaley said. In North Carolina, all settlement funds go to county governments. Other states use the default template of devoting 15 percent to local governments and the rest for a state-appointed panel to appropriate as it sees fit.

In Rhode Island, district leaders haven’t yet received funds allocated for expanding mental health resources, said Jim Erinakes, the superintendent of the Exeter-West Greenwich district and president-elect of the Rhode Island School Superintendents Association.

Oregon districts are set to take advantage of some portion of a 45 percent set-aside of settlement funds meant for opioid prevention and treatment. But a spokesperson for the Beaverton district said the Oregon Department of Justice hasn’t yet communicated how districts can actually access the funds. A spokesperson for the state agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Florida’s attorney general, Ashley Moody, last April sued the Miami-Dade school board and five hospital systems to prevent them from directly taking part in the settlement fund intended for the state, arguing that their involvement would slow down the process of implementing relief efforts.

That litigation is ongoing and no settlement has been reached, said Jaquelyn Diaz, a spokesperson for the Miami-Dade schools. Moody’s office didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

The Rochester, N.Y., schools are also currently contesting the state’s apparent position that the district shouldn’t directly receive opioid settlement funds, said Ricardo Adams, a school board member who’s the district’s point person for opioid litigation.

Even with all the complications, there are bright spots for schools. Districts nationwide will be able to apply for $25.5 million in grants for special education services funded by bankruptcy court proceedings for a case against Purdue Pharma. Maine’s settlement agreement with McKinsey specifies that 3 percent of the state’s $130 million allocation will go toward special education services in schools. The Boise and West Ada school districts in Idaho are among the “special districts” that will receive a portion of the state’s McKinsey settlement dollars.

Whaley, the Johns Hopkins researcher, and her colleagues are urging state lawmakers and other officials involved in allocating funds to prioritize racial equity and evidence-based approaches to tackling the opioid crisis.

“It’s easy to be, like, let’s use the money to fund another ‘say no to drugs’ program. What’s hard is taking the time to plan and to think strategically when resources are scarce and time is scarce,” she said. “If we don’t do that, the decisionmakers who have the power are going to do what they’ve always done.”

A former K-5 public school principal turned author, presenter, and leadership coach, DeWitt provides insights and advice for education leaders. He can be found at www.petermdewitt.com. Read more from this blog.

In order to go from our current state of academic obsession to a combination of well-being and learning, research and practice have shown that it takes a while to get to specificity with complex matters. There are two absolutely core concepts, working in tandem, that are imperative: relationships and pedagogy (the nature and practice of learning). Included in these findings—and this is absolutely crucial—is that both these concepts must be context specific (what I call “contextual literacy”). Their use is grounded in the personal and cultural knowledge of the groups in question—always.

One of the mysteries of change is that it is difficult to establish and keep relationships and pedagogy working together. Yet, if you have one without the other, you do not progress. Teachers can be great at caring, including diverse groups of students, but if the pedagogy is not grounded in the culture of the students in question, overall learning will fail. Or teachers’ pedagogical knowledge may be great, but they fail to understand the cultures and lives of their students. The challenge of our times is addressing mental health and well-being while trying to meet curriculum expectations, i.e, crowded curriculum and difficult learning conditions laced with anxiety and stress. Understanding and addressing both relationships and pedagogy is the challenge of the century for schools.

To those who say that the status quo persists because it serves the powerful, I agree to a point, but: i) a dwindling number of people actually benefit from the present system; ii) existing strategies over the past 50 years have failed time and again; and iii) even those who are in favor of changing the status quo are failing to make a difference. Nothing we are doing works!

One of the interesting byproducts of the pandemic is that teachers, parents, and students have become more aware of the external context of schools. In this sense, people have the potential to become more system-oriented. In the hands of good leaders, this can be used to advantage. But with traditional leaders, it can become a hierarchical hell—making decisions about complex problems without knowledge. The idea is to listen to people who know the context, who live in it every day.

Students’ attitudes about the meaning of school means varies greatly. For example, some students are less likely to be forced (by parents) to go to school. On the flip side, teachers become more aware that school might be a haven for some students from danger on the outside. Here is an interesting twist relative to what I refer to as academic obsession: When a student does not show up at school, some teachers immediately worry about the mental health of the student (“I wonder if they are all right”) before they think of “lost learning.” Policy and wider practice have not caught up to this intriguing nuance—that well-being is key. The dissonance comes from top-level bureaucrats or politicians who continue to focus only on learning loss and state tests, when the contextual reality at the class and school level is to address well-being and new forms of learning such as the global competencies.

Simplexity requires us to identify the smallest number of key actions that can get us on the road to redemption—hit the ground running. Action is urgent because society with increasing alacrity is heading into what appears to be an abyss—the interaction between social degradation and climate collapse. With the knowledge that deliberate system transformation is rare, and crisis is upon us, people may be prepared to do “something” if it has promise and provides early momentum. Here is a summary of breakthrough change that seems possible to me:

1) Recognize that systems are extremely difficult to change even when large numbers want change.

2) Focus on relationships and pedagogy grounded in cultural context or you won’t have a chance.

3) Worry that the focus in No. 2 will wane if not constantly attended to.

4) Integrate academics and deep learning. Don’t slip back into academic obsession—the helping hand strikes again.

5) Beware of a more subtle academic priority problem. You may improve relationships, and pedagogy to improve literacy and numeracy, and be “successful” in that results increase but fail to address the deeper well-being goals or even academic goals related to the 6Cs that are crucial for coping and thriving in a complex society. In such a case, you would have achieved “improvement” but not transformation. In effect, you would have produced a better version of the status quo—getting better at an old game. Fit for schooling not necessarily for life. The old grammar of school can be subtle.

6) Build connections to the outside: community, civic agencies, technology, business, policy, world issues like climate, poverty, discrimination, and financial quality. The universe is a system, too, and you are implicated. If you haven’t developed your relationships and pedagogy, you won’t make a good partner in these endeavors.