The Campbell County School District's Board of Trustees approved the new policy that looks to prepare staff in the event of an opioid overdose.
The Campbell County School District will now allow staff like school nurses, coaches, and secretaries to be trained to recognize the signs of an overdose and properly administer naloxone, or Narcan, which is a nasal spray that can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose.
The district's Nurse Coordinator Julie Lang said they will keep the naloxone with each school's emergency supplies.
"We won't have separate prescriptions and different staff carrying it. The naloxone will be kept with our stock epinephrine, so the two will be together. And then the staff have access to that along with the AED [automated external defibrillator] for emergencies," Lang said.
She said all school nurses will be trained. Otherwise, each building or school will decide which staff to train.
"In most of the buildings, if the nurse is out of the building, someone typically from the office is the person that covers the health office, so that would probably be a for sure," she said.
Lang said getting this policy in place is significant in light of recent overdose deaths in the community, as well as concerns of opioid addiction across the country.
The district is applying for a grant from the Wyoming Department of Health to support the program. Lang said the district will get together a training plan in the coming weeks.
Under Wyoming law, any person can ask a pharmacist to prescribe them naloxone.
Have a question about this story? Contact the reporter, Catherine Wheeler, at cwheel11@uwyo.edu.