Addressing student substance use in Canadian schools: an exploration of administrators’ perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To support the development of evidence-informed guidance for Canadian Kindergarten through Grade 12 (K-12) school administrators, this study examined their perceptions of the scope of student substance use and the challenges they face in responding within school settings. An online, cross-sectional survey collected data from 204 Canadian school administrators, capturing their experiences and perspectives on student substance use, including the types of challenges encountered, time spent addressing them, perceived capacity to respond, and differences across school levels (elementary, middle, and secondary). Responses from elementary/middle and secondary school administrators were compared in the analysis. Approximately 90% of administrators reported frequent student substance use challenges. The most common challenges were vaping (63.7%) and substance use on school property (41.7%). Secondary school administrators reported significantly more challenges and were more likely to spend in excess of 5 hours weekly addressing substance use. Most administrators reported a willingness to change practices (64.7%), but fewer felt equipped or effective in their current approaches. Student substance use poses a significant challenge for Canadian schools, particularly at the secondary level, increasing administrator workload. Administrators report feeling underprepared and insufficiently supported, despite a willingness to act. Findings highlight an urgent need for developmentally informed, evidence-aligned strategies and resources to support school-based responses to substance use and overall school health promotion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".