It only takes a couple of puffs of Naloxone to save a life, so why was this life-saving drug so hard to find at Rio?

Naloxone, also known as Narcan, is a drug that can help save those who are overdosing on fentanyl.

When trying to find out if Rio stocked it, I asked not only our staff, but people at the district, and I got contrasting answers.

According to Principal Cliff Kelly, while Rio had stocked and distributed some Narcan, the rest was sent back to the district to be redistributed among all the schools.

“We were one of the first schools in the district to have a fentanyl assembly,” Kelly said. “We had started handing (Narcan) out to parents, but got told to pack the Narcan up in boxes and send it back to the district office.”

However, Narcan was available at every school in the district as of December 2022, according to communication director Raj Rai.

Turns out, the admin wasn’t told where the Narcan was. After another round of emails, I found out where it was.

In the nurse’s office, I was shown eight boxes of Narcan in a cabinet, which apparently had been there since last December.

Why were they all in one place? Why was there so much confusion?

While the confusion could just be a simple lack of communication, my first question has yet to be answered. The Narcan is stored in a small, hard-tosee cabinet on the right side of the nurse’s office, and it’s soon to be under lock and key, with only a few people having access.

In the case of an emergency on the other side of campus or after school hours, would it get there on time?

Luckily, there is a solution to this problem: Keep the Narcan with Rio’s four AEDs, stocked in the office, the gym, the cafeteria and on the golf cart that drives around school. This is the way many districts, including Davis, keep Narcan at the ready.

This would be the quickest way to get the Narcan anywhere in the school, and staff wouldn’t have to wait to unlock a cabinet to get access to this life-saving product.