Bryan’s Story: Upper St. Clair parent, educator warn about dangers of drug abuse
The specter of heroin abuse is a frightening proposition, especially for a certain and perhaps surprising demographic.
“The scariest part is the fact that the best customers for the drug dealers are the richer kids in the suburbs, those kids who can get the money,” Jace Palmer said. “They’re very reliable customers.”
As a guidance counselor at Fort Couch Middle School and former assistant principal at Upper St. Clair High School, Palmer routinely sees the potential for problems in that regard.
For nine years, he and Upper St. Clair resident Mike Burch have been supplying deterrents with Bryan’s Story, a cautionary program about Burch’s son, who died of a heroin overdose in 2004.
“There had to be a reason we lost Bryan, and if he had to go for something like this,” Burch said about the program, “this is the reason.”
A public presentation of Bryan’s Story is scheduled for 7 p.m. Oct. 19 in the Community and Recreation Center at Boyce Mayview Park, as organized by the township’s Youth Steering Committee and Together In Parenting, a committee of the Upper St. Clair PTA Council. Throughout the school year, all eighth-graders at Fort Couch participate in the program.
“I look at my role as just telling Bryan’s story and let the students understand that Bryan was just like them: went to the same schools, same upbringing, same neighborhood,” Burch explained. “And even though he had all that going for him, look what happened when he made one wrong decision.”
During the program, Palmer elaborates on what leads to such decisions.
“The prescription painkillers are really the gateway to the heroin,” he said. “In Bryan’s case and with other students that I’ve had the cases, it began with pills. They then become too expensive, and you have to resort, once that addiction starts, to what you can afford.”
Burch and Palmer use printed materials during the program, passing around photos of Bryan as a child and providing each participant with a copy of the last two pages of the journal he kept.
“The kids are able to go into the mind of an addict,” Palmer said. “There is very powerful language in it, and Mike and I do not dumb it down. We don’t make it rated PG. The kids take it extremely seriously. I think the more they see him as being just a regular kid, the more powerful that is, knowing that this could happen to them.”
Students can read Bryan’s own harrowing words about how his addiction destroyed his life before taking it.
“They see for themselves he is really suffering, that it’s not anything you ever want to go through,” Burch said. “And I think that’s what makes this so powerful.”
Fortunately for the Burches, Mike and his wife, Kathy, have watched their younger son lead a much different life than that of his brother.
“Cris has a college degree, a great wife, two young children, lives in Upper St. Clair. In essence, living the American dream,” Palmer said, and the contrast delivers an integral message for the program: “We’re trying to show the kids that a really, really bad decision could be a life-or-death decision when it comes to hard drugs.”
For more information, visit bryanburch.com.