By Bill Husfelt, Superintendent, Bay District Schools
We are always trying to share important messages of hope and encouragement with our students and recently I had the chance to hear one of the most inspiring messages I’ve heard in recent memory and I’d like to share part of it with you.
Students were gathered at J.R. Arnold High School for the “The Facts, Your Future” assembly which is an initiative from our First Lady, Casey DeSantis. The initiative focuses on making sure students have important information about how their lives are negatively impacted by illegal substances so they can make informed and healthy decisions. The assembly included our Bay County Sheriff Tommy Ford, our own Sandon Speedling from the Florida Department of Health in Bay County, and Frederick Womack from the Department of Juvenile Justice in Tallahassee and a former Arnold student.
Sheldon Jernigan, the former Arnold student, is currently a successful realtor with Beachy Beach Real Estate and is the father of two students who attend Bay District Schools. But Sheldon wasn’t at the assembly to talk about his children or his successful career; he was there to share his personal addiction story with students in the hopes that it would help some of them.
Sheldon told the young audience about how he started using gateway drugs and alcohol at an early age and how he knew, for sure, that he had a handle on his usage and that he wouldn’t let it get out of control.
He candidly admits how wrong he was.
Fast forward a few years, and Sheldon shared that there was a nationwide missing person’s report out for him while he was living on “skid row” in California and using drugs every day. Stealing to help pay for his habit, Sheldon was homeless and hopeless.
But his family never gave up on him and continued searching.
Unfortunately, during that time, Sheldon’s wife (who had custody of their children) passed away from an overdose and the children went to live with their grandmother.
And that knowledge, that his children were without a parent, helped set Sheldon on the path to recovery. His troubled past led to more than 15 stints in rehabilitation and countless arrests and encounters with law enforcement.
Sheldon begged the students in attendance to take care of each other, to intervene with friends who are making bad decisions and to ask for help for themselves or others. His story, he noted, has a happy ending but so many do not.
It’s all too easy for our children to think that bad things happen to those who use drugs in other places but not here. Sheriff Ford noted that more than 300 Bay County residents died last year from overdoses and he equated that to all of the students sitting in one-third of the auditorium. Sandon Speedling told the students about the personal addiction story with a family member of his and that person’s eventual death. I shared the story of my own father who battled alcoholism, and the impact that had on my brothers and me.
We must keep telling our students about these stories, these facts, these numbers and these tragedies. We must help them understand that “bad things” do happen to good people here and that it only takes one tainted piece of food, one tainted pill, one chance encounter with something deadly like fentanyl to cause life-long repercussions and even death.
I am grateful to all who helped share this important message at Arnold recently and all of those who are sharing their stories with our students at other locations and in the community. We must do all we can to protect this generation from the evil that exists in this world and it’s going to take a concerted effort by ALL of us to achieve that lofty but worthwhile goal.
Thank you for all you do to support our students. Stay safe and God Bless!
