Fast Times at Westwind junior high

After moving to Phoenix, she took a job in the Madison District, teaching kids on in-school suspension, and found herself enthralled by a particular student's stories about life as an Eastside Crip. When that position ended, she took a job teaching P.E. at the Harold W. Smith magnet school in Glendale -- a low-income school with, at the time, the second-lowest test grades in the state and a high gang rate.

Perhamus signed on immediately, and quickly learned what she says remains her key to getting the truth out of troubled kids: "If you respect them, the kids will all tell you their stories. And then you start to realize that there's a lot more to it."

She says that's what they try to get to at Calderwood: the problems really driving the kids to use drugs. Much of the time, bad family influences are at the root -- which can make it particularly hard to get the kids into the program, since the parents have to be involved, too.

"The parents of many of the kids we've tried to help get very angry with us," she says. "It's a very hard thing to sit down in a school office and be told your child is using a hard-core drug."

Making it harder yet, says Westwind's Coria, who recommends a transfer to Calderwood when a student shows definite signs of drug problems, often the parents of a meth-addicted student look like they're modeling the lifestyle.

"The parents will come in all tatted up, with a doo-rag and the flag hanging out, and you think, 'Okay, what do I do here?'" he says. "We have to tell them, 'Leave that stuff at home. There are home rules, and there are school rules. And we have to enforce them.' This is a community problem. It's not a school problem. We deal with the school piece, but as a community, we all have to be on the same page."

Richards believes society is on a steep decline, and that the problems in his district are just a concentrated preview of where all schools are headed.

"It's getting worse," he says. "The availability of these drugs is increasing significantly. The social acceptance of inhalants, and these pill parties, and alcohol, is increasing. You see it on TV, and in the music kids are listening to. It's socially accepted.

"We need to give kids the skills to make that distinction between what is accepted social behavior and what is not," he says. "And that's a hard thing to do, especially when this negative stuff is all around you."

Before Ron Richards gave the green light to Amy Perhamus' alternative school, he first put in a call to all the other elementary and middle schools in the district to ask them how they were handling their meth problem.

To his surprise, most of the principals responded with the same befuddled words: "What meth problem?"

"Some will admit they've caught kids with marijuana," Richards says. "But the attitude is often, 'Well, at least it's not heroin,' you know?" When asked specifically about meth, Richards says most administrators describe their worst offenders as "kids robbing their parents' medicine chest, and taking pills 'til they get dizzy."

Richards, like Perhamus, believes that other principals and police officers aren't seeing a problem that exists right under their noses.

Those other principals and police officers, however, believe they are the ones seeing the problem clearly.

They say meth isn't showing up in the Valley's junior high and elementary schools. They say that adolescent use of drugs hasn't changed much in the past 40 years, since, yes, the 1960s.

They note that Perhamus and Richards are seeing things from the perspective of arguably the toughest neighborhood in the Valley.

But this opinion also is coming from police officers and educators who work in some of the Valley's other toughest neighborhoods.

Before the '60s, cops say, kids just experimented with booze, which, researchers point out early and often, is still by far the biggest chemical problem facing today's young people.

This issue of properly assessing the problem is no small matter.

Because as top drug researchers such as Dr. Barry Lester of Brown University point out, much of the Drug War's worst policies and programs were born of bad data and bad science.