The West Virginia Partnership to Promote Community Well-Being, a strategic policy and planning board appointed by Governor Joe Manchin (D), release a report that claims alcohol and substance abuse costs West Virginia schools $13 million annually. That figure includes funding for prevention, treatment, and school-based mental health programs in elementary and secondary schools, as well as colleges and universities, and does not include spending on staffing, special education programs, drug and alcohol related truancy, property damages, and legal costs. The partnership recommends that the state adopt a proposal it offered last year, which would include $23.5 million annually for prevention, intervention, treatment, and recovery services. Lawmakers attempted to raise that funding earlier this year with an unsuccessful proposal for a tax on beer and an unsuccessful bid to use surplus Medicaid funds. The report is the third in a series released by the partnership. The first two reports found the annual cost of alcohol and substance abuse to be $116 million and $333 million for the health care system and the criminal justice system, respectively.
From the report:
The present study, however, only provides detailed breakdown of the cost of providing prevention and treatment services to students at West Virginia’s elementary and secondary schools and IHEs, and found this to be $13 million in 2009. To obtain these estimates, this report adopts a mix of methodologies from two previous studies that estimated the cost of drug and alcohol use. The first, “Shoveling Up: The Impact of Substance Abuse on State Budgets,” was first released by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University in 2001 and was recently updated in 2009. The second study, titled “Integrated Funding Analysis of Mental Health and Substance Use in West Virginia,” was released by the Public Consulting Group (PCG) in 2007.
The present study, however, makes some unique contributions to the two reports. First, it provides more recent estimates of the cost of drug and alcohol use to the state. Second, it provides cost trends over five years and, based on those trends, makes projections for costs in year 2017. This year was chosen to coincide with the estimation made about needs in other systems serving persons with substance abuse problems in the state. Unless otherwise noted, linear trend was assumed for these projections. Third, this report includes higher education, which is impacted by drugs and alcohol use but was excluded from both CASA’s and PCG’s reports. Finally, this report was initiated with the intent of producing annual updates; consequently, only data that are available annually were used.
Full reort: The Financial Burden of Substance Abuse in West Virginia: The Education System (PDF | 621.37 KB)
West Virginia Partnership to Promote Community Well-Being. (2010). The financial burden of substance abuse in West Virginia: the education system. Shobo, Y., Coombs, W. and Whisman, A.
