Winning would be great, but some Burrell High School students have a more important goal in mind when it comes to the district's latest competition.
They're looking for viral video status — a means to get their anti-heroin message to as many people as possible.
“We want people to quite literally open their eyes about this problem,” said Caitlin Lender, a junior who helped produce the school's latest video highlighting the costs of heroin and opioid abuse. “People need to realize that others around them could be involved in this and it could get worse in really no time at all. It's happening, and we need to prevent it.”
Burrell is one of several local high schools to produce videos for the FBI's Pittsburgh field office. The clips are part of the H.O.P.E. Initiative, or Heroin Outreach Prevention and Education. Each public service announcement, written and produced by high school students, is aimed at fellow students with one purpose: prevent the next heroin overdose death.
Submitted videos will be judged in mid-January by a panel of law enforcement, health professionals, educators and recovered addicts. Each video also will be scored according to the number of likes, views and shares received online.
Also participating locally are Freeport Area, Franklin Regional, Highlands, Kiski Area, Leechburg and Springdale high schools.
According to FBI Community Outreach Specialist Kelly Wesolosky, the move to use high school students to help spread the word about heroin just makes sense.
“We wanted to engage youth to raise awareness with each other on the dangers of heroin and opioid use,” she said. “We believe that peer-to-peer communication is the most effective way to reach youth today.”
This is the second year for the H.O.P.E. Initiative. Last year, four schools took part, each submitting a video. This year, 25 schools representing six counties submitted 37 public service announcement videos. The three top-scoring teams get a cash prize.
Last year, the team from Burrell High School submitted a video called “Nobody Wins With Heroin” that won first place. This year, members of the Burrell team, who call themselves the H.O.P.E.ful Eight, submitted a video titled “Open Your Eyes,” a call for students everywhere to see and acknowledge the rapidly escalating problem of heroin.
“Obviously, this epidemic is growing,” Lender said. “If there was something we could do, we wanted to get involved and raise awareness in any way we could.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heroin use has gone up significantly in the past 10 years. From 2002 to 2007, heroin was used by about one person out of every 1,000. In 2008, that number started to rise, and now twice as many Americans are hooked on heroin.
Use has increased without respect to age, gender, race or class — across every demographic, the drug has become a problem.
Heroin-related overdose deaths have also risen as the drug has become more widespread. Statistics provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse show that heroin overdose rates in 2014, the latest year for which data are available, were six times those of 2001.
“My neighbor overdosed on heroin,” Marlee Pinchok, a Burrell senior and actress in the video said. “It was really sad. She had a little girl who was about 6, and then she died. It was really unfortunate.”
For others, the dangers of heroin hit even closer to home.
“My uncle and his wife got addicted to heroin,” said Gwen Wadsworth, a Burrell senior who helped produce the public service announcement. “Their son was in the house sometimes. It became such a problem that they got caught and arrested.”
Wadsworth said getting caught was a good thing for her family members. Her uncle is off the drug and well on the road to recovery, she said.
The students at Burrell are planning a school assembly in February to present their public service announcement. Their video has been viewed more than 1,200 times, and the students of the video team think it might prevent what inspired it in the first place.
“We came across this article in a newspaper about this one day in Huntington, W.Va., where they had 28 overdoses in one day,” senior Hanna Henderson said.
“We thought that was outrageous. But it goes to show how the problem is increasing. That could be 28 of our peers. So we wanted to raise awareness that it is happening and can happen to anyone.”
Burrell's winnings from last year were donated to Lower Burrell police through the school's resource officer. The team hopes to be able to do the same this year.
More than winning, though, the students want the video to go viral so it can help as many people as possible.
Matthew Medsger is a contributing writer.
