Sobriety High to Close After School Year Concludes

Officials at Sobriety High have announced that the 2012-2013 school year will be the recovery charter's last.

"It's a difficult business model to sustain," said Executive Director Paul McGlynn, who added that a longtime donor pulled out a few weeks ago. "That was a game changer."

If Sobriety High is to survive, it will need an immediate infusion of about $400,000 to avert imminent closure of both its campuses, which are located in Burnsville and Coon Rapids. McGlynn judged the odds of a sudden turnaround to be "pretty slim." 

The Burnsville campus services Shakopee, Savage and a large number of communities in the south metro area.

Sobriety High has a relatively long history. McGlynn said Sobriety High has been around—in one form or another—for 21 years. It started as an alternative learning center in Edina. In 2003, the ALC became a charter and began expanding. A Maplewood campus was added, then Burnsville, Coon Rapids, and Litchfield.

The organization has been through its share of famine years, though the charter was able to pull through until recently. In 2007, the recession hit the string of sobriety schools hard. The Litchfield school was nixed shortly after opening. Then Sobriety High had to close two more campuses—Maplewood and Edina—in 2010.

After the closures in 2010, the charter's fortunes seemed to be improving for a time. However, McGlynn and Debbie Bolton, a social worker and assistant executive director, say that the charter's business model has a structural flaw that has made it increasingly difficult to stay solvent. Due to the nature of addiction, the school's student body is often transitory, but the Minnesota Department of Education funds Sobriety High according to the same formula used by traditional high schools: Funds are alloted according to an enrollment statistic called Average Daily Membership.

One thing drives down enrollment numbers is on campus drug use. Sobriety High has a no tolerance policy toward students who use at school, though students who relapse on their own time are allowed to continue. The policy is necessary for the school to keep Sobriety High sober, McGlynn and Bolton say.

"We're very vigilant about that. We don't let kids use in our schools," McGlynn said. "We move very quickly to get them out of the school if they do that."

That means that though 142 kids went through the two campuses this year, only a fraction of that figure was accounted for by the state's educational funding formula.

"You have to have personnel to deal with the kids coming through but you don't get paid for almost two-thirds of them. That hurts," McGlynn said. "That isn't the state being unfair. That's just how it works."

"It's our model not fitting in with the structure in place," Bolton agreed.

Officials with Sobriety High have lobbied to change the funding formula for recovery schools, to account for these losses. Since the school's enrollment fluctuates in a way that is more akin to a treatment center, they have also asked the Minnesota Department of Health to contribute, to no avail.

"If you funded treatment centers only for those who successfully completed the program, without any relapses, every treatment center would be out of business like that," McGlynn said. "We're caught between the Department of Health and MDE. No one really wants to touch us." 

On May 8, Sobriety High will hold a meeting with the students and their families to talk about what the future may hold.