Youth legislators make case for student-written law addressing drug addiction

Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

CARSON CITY — When Kathleen McCarthy considers who would benefit from the bill she wrote, she specifically remembers her childhood friend Daniella and her middle-school classmate Lauren.

McCarthy, a junior at West Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas and member of the Nevada Youth Legislature, worked with other talented young people across the state to develop legislation for consideration by elected officials. Her bill would require school staff to report students showing signs of drug use to administrators and parents, with the goal of helping these students stay on track.

Under what is now Senate Bill 254, students suspected of being under the influence at school would have a conference with school staff alongside their parents or guardians and receive resources to steer them away from substance abuse.

It means a lot to McCarthy.

Lauren, who sat behind her in class, would talk to her friends about how she got into her mother’s cigarettes and pills and would be high before 7 a.m. McCarthy didn’t know what became of Lauren, but knows that Daniella died in eighth grade after taking a pill laced with fentanyl.

Daniella, who was 13, got the drugs from an adult man she met over social media in exchange for explicit photos.

The girls lost touch as they grew older, but McCarthy still had a photo of them in younger and happier days on her refrigerator when she found out that her friend had died.

When McCarthy applied to the Nevada Youth Legislature, she wrote on her application that she wanted to propose this bill.

Over her two-year term, she learned about the negotiation, persuasion, public speaking and communications skills needed to make it happen, she said.

“If I’m passionate about something, I can take it far,” she said.

Each of Nevada’s 21 state senators appoints a youth legislator to represent their senatorial districts. The program has brought teenagers directly into the state’s representative government process since 2007.

The Youth Legislature submits a bill every legislative session, which they choose from among everyone’s proposals and refine as a group. The program has a good track record — of the previous nine bills or resolutions it has presented, seven have been approved by the governor, according to program records.

This session, the youth legislators also considered proposals that would have placed metal detectors in schools, limited solitary confinement in juvenile detention facilities, and hit parents or guardians with a felony and up to 20 years in prison if their minor child misuses a gun, among other ideas.

“Throughout our two-year term, my fellow youth legislators and I have worked diligently to learn about, represent and advocate for our youth constituents,” Youth Legislature Chair Sebastian Rios, who represents Senate District 18 in northwest Las Vegas, wrote in a letter to the Senate Education Committee urging support of SB 254. “We have completed powerful training sessions on topics including active listening skills and presentation skills. We communicated with our constituents through the hosting of town halls to learn about the issues they are struggling with as well as to discuss what solutions we may advocate for to directly resolve those issues.”

Substance abuse came up often in these town halls, he said.

Several youth legislators traveled to Carson City this month to meet with lawmakers, tour the Capitol and support McCarthy as she presented their bill to the committee.

“What an impressive group of young people,” said state Sen. Angie Taylor, D-Reno, after the hourlong hearing. “We are in good hands.”

In the Capitol hearing room, with all its glossy dark woods and formal etiquette, McCarthy calmly tapped her honed persuasion skills to make her case. She extrapolated national statistics on youth drug use and addiction to Nevada teens, saying these peers would be more likely to suffer from mental health problems, poor family relationships, low academic achievement, limited social lives, and addiction into adulthood. They could eventually turn to criminal activity and die young.

“And yet we are lacking proactive and protective measures for handling drug use in our state. That is what SB 254 is,” she said at the March 5 hearing. “It is a way to start identifying individuals who are using drugs at a pivotal time in their life, a time when intervention can hopefully get them onto a better path and set them up for success.”

Although lawmakers had concerns with some bill language, they delivered them kindly. McCarthy, who represents Senate District 6 in the Summerlin area, took their questions in stride. With amendments to protect student rights, she said she was confident that her bill would advance.

She said she wants to help, not hurt — the proposed conferences would be interventionary, not punitive. They wouldn’t go on students’ disciplinary records or transcripts, and records would eventually be purged.

“Hopefully I’ll make a lasting impression on the youth of the state,” she said.