Little Rock’s Drug, Alcohol-Abuse Insurance Offers Students Help : Health: The Arkansas district provides 100% coverage for education, early intervention, family therapy and other services.

When a new year of classes began last month, students in Little Rock got something besides books and assignments: complete insurance coverage for drug and alcohol-abuse treatment.

City and school officials worked with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Arkansas to provide 100% coverage for the district’s 26,000 students.

“It provides our youngsters with an opportunity to receive help,” said Jo Evelyn Elston, the district’s director of pupil services.

Abuse of drugs and alcohol is “a problem we’ve not been able to address in the past for not having the resources to get these children into the programs that they needed,” she said.

The student-insurance program, called “Fight Back! Insure the Children,” will provide services for alcohol and drug abusers, ranging from education and early intervention to intensive treatment. It also includes family-therapy coverage.

The group that spearheaded the program, Little Rock Fighting Back, estimates that 33% of those arrested for murder in the last year in Little Rock were teen-agers and that alcoholism and other drug abuse were involved in about 25% of those cases.

One student was referred to the program on the first day of school, Elston said. The referral came to the district from a community agency where the student had sought aid. The student will get help from an agency that has agreed to participate in the program, she said.

“The agency that referred (him) could not have provided the service,” she said. Among other treatment, Elston said, the student was recommended for three group sessions three times a week, for up to eight weeks.

The school district hired three people to assess and refer children to the program.

In April, city and school district officials announced a drive to raise money to pay for the program. Parents were asked to donate $10 a child. But the effort fell short. The district raised only $68,728, and almost failed to meet the Aug. 26 deadline for the first of two $133,500 premiums due to Blue Cross & Blue Shield.

The premium was paid with help from an $80,000 interest-free loan from Twin City Bank of North Little Rock.

“The summer was really a bad time to start,” said Frankie Sarver, executive director of the Fighting Back initiative. Now that school has started, she said, she expects parent-teacher associations to help raise additional money.

Blue Cross & Blue Shield is charging no administrative fee for the coverage, a spokesman said.

The school program grew out of the work of Little Rock Fighting Back, a coalition of community leaders and city officials. The coalition operates under a $200,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of Princeton, N.J.

The foundation announced in February, 1989, the availability of $26.4 million in grants for cities to establish treatment and prevention programs to combat drug and alcohol abuse.