Back in January, Hallsville High School started sending a small sample of its wastewater off for testing every week — part of a voluntary state pilot program most of us never heard about. On Jan. 13, that sample came back positive for nitazenes, a class of synthetic opioid that can run five to ten times stronger than fentanyl. Boonville High School and Boonville Alternate School flagged the same thing not long after, according to ABC 17 News. Statewide, 26 of the 37 schools that volunteered for testing this year came back positive.
None of that tells anyone which student, or where the drug was actually used — the testing just samples what’s already in the pipes. But it was enough to get Hallsville’s district coordinating with Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services, the Boone County Office of Emergency Management, and local law enforcement, and to get naloxone (Narcan) on campus, per ABC 17’s follow-up reporting. Missouri State Highway Patrol and local health officials have said nitazenes are increasingly turning up cut into counterfeit pills, illicit powders, and even vape liquid — often without the user knowing it’s there.
Now the voluntary part is going away. The Missouri Department of Public Safety’s wastewater surveillance program is becoming mandatory statewide after the legislature passed a law requiring it, and mandatory sampling is expected to start in mid-September, according to Missourinet. “The contractor, they are out mapping the sewage systems for schools around the state,” DPS spokesman Mike O’Connell told Missourinet. The program is expected to grow from its roughly 40-school pilot footprint toward about 150 schools in its first mandatory year, with no cost or extra work required of the districts themselves.
There’s a wrinkle worth knowing about: even as testing becomes mandatory, KBIA reports that O’Connell has said the program’s own funding is slated to be cut in half next fiscal year — so how fast the mandate actually reaches every district, including the ones in our own backyard, is still an open question.
For now, the takeaway for Howard and Cooper County parents is straightforward: two of the schools our kids’ friends and teammates attend already turned up a genuine warning sign this year, and the state is about to make that kind of testing the rule everywhere rather than the exception. It’s not a reason to panic — the testing can’t tell you who used what, or when — but it’s a reason to know it’s happening, and to know that naloxone and a district emergency plan are already in place at Hallsville, with other area schools likely to follow suit as the mandate rolls out this fall.
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