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Recovery in the News
Texas Tech's addiction recovery program to be used nationwide
HANNAH CRUZ
Lubbock Avalanche Journal
April 9, 2011
Texas Tech’s process for helping students recover from addiction has done so well it’s poised to be replicated nationally.
Tech’s Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery held its second annual Collegiate Recovery Conference on Friday and announced big news that will have ramifications beyond Tech’s campus.
The conference, sharing research, discussing ideas and forming support regarding collegiate recovery communities on campuses, included representatives from 50 different universities across the country, and included a representative from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Because of the great success Tech’s collegiate recovery community has had in assisting students in their recovery process as well as attaining a college degree, the model is about to go national.
Matt Russell, associate director of the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery, said students involved in the program have higher graduation rates and higher GPAs than any other student organization on campus.
“It not only works,” he said, “it’s been shown to work at different universities across the country.”
Russell said Tech isn’t looking for any glory, it simply wants to spread the word across the nation that there is a future for students whose addictive past would dictate otherwise. That future, he said, is in education.
Tech announced two new national programs designed to further the development of collegiate recovery communities across the nation. These programs, headed by Tech, The National Foundation of Collegiate Recovery and The Association for Recovery in Higher Education, will serve different purposes.
The National Foundation of Collegiate Recovery will join universities across the nation as they seek to improve addiction recovery programs to assist students in their journey to graduation.
This program will serve three different national purposes: to assist other universities in starting and maintaining their own collegiate recovery community, provide scholarships for students involved in collegiate recovery communities to go to the school of their choice and to fund research focused on recovery of addiction, rather than treatment.
Kitty Harris, director of the addiction center, said she has high hopes for a national program such as this.
“It’s to create a sphere of influence to be able to reach out and save the lives of bright, bright kids that often just make some really bad choices as really dumb adolescents,” she said. “And that’s the exciting part for me — to get to be a part of that.”
The Association for Recovery in Higher Education will join universities across the nation in collaboration on research and provide a forum for continued discussion and support.
Russell said national movements like this can change social perceptions of addiction and recovery.
“It’s something that’s not talked about a lot,” he said. “National conferences like this say that their addiction has a face — recovery has a face.”
Subsequent conferences are planned to be held at universities participating in the association.