ST. LOUIS — A high school designed for teenagers who are recovering from drug or alcohol abuse has the green light to open in the St. Louis area this fall.

The Missouri Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday to approve three “recovery high schools,” a decision set in motion by legislation signed by Gov. Mike Kehoe in July. The other schools will be in the Kansas City area and Cape Girardeau.

They will join more than 40 recovery high schools across the United States that surround students with resources to help keep them on the path to sobriety while they earn diplomas.

Organizers in the St. Louis area have not settled on a location for the school, which will be publicly funded. Enrollment is expected to open in April.

"We're thrilled. It's been years of hard work, and I have to say we're having a celebration today," Kelli Unnerstall, a local advocate for recovery high schools, said after the board's vote. "We're so looking forward to young people having the right services once they get out of treatment. It's going to be life-changing."

Unnerstall's Chesterfield-based nonprofit, Aspire Advocates, pushed for years to establish a local recovery school. The effort gained traction when millions in funding from Missouri’s share of a $21 billion settlement with opioid distributors was earmarked for the recovery schools' startup costs.

“There is no other state in the nation that has had such a comprehensive, full-court press approach that Missouri has,” Melissa Mouton told the state board of education at its December meeting.

Mouton is the founder of Vivo Missouri, a new organization that is sponsoring the schools in St. Louis and Kansas City, which will also be called Vivo. Mouton founded a recovery high school in Denver seven years ago and was tapped by Aspire to bring her model to the St. Louis area.

Recovery high schools have been around since at least the 1970s. Some charge tuition; others operate within school districts or as charters — independently run but financed with tax dollars.

Vivo St. Louis and Vivo Kansas City will be publicly funded private schools, an unusual arrangement made possible by last year’s law. The school in Cape Girardeau will be public and operated by the Cape Girardeau School District. The law also allows for recovery schools to be run as charters or to be sponsored by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Last month, Mouton told Missouri Board of Education members that school districts in the St. Louis area had been averse to such an undertaking, and that a charter would limit enrollment of a recovery school to city residents. That left the private school option.

“We will look, feel, function and be financed very much like a public school, but on paper we are a private school, simply because we want to be accessible to every family in the region,” Mouton said at the meeting.

Vivo submitted its application to DESE in July. The proposal included letters of support from parents, young adults in recovery, health care and criminal justice professionals, and St. Louis County Executive Sam Page.

Graduation rates at recovery high schools are 20% higher than for at-risk students at traditional high schools, and relapse rates are lower, according to the Association of Recovery Schools, a national nonprofit.

Vivo St. Louis will include daily peer-led recovery meetings, academic coaching, counseling and “project-based learning,” a hands-on approach to education. Organizers also hope to have many of the traditional trappings of high school: dances, clubs and recreational sports.

Recovery schools are more expensive to run than traditional high schools, mostly because of a higher staff-to-student ratio and the additional services.

Vivo’s first-year budget of almost $2 million assumes 20 students and a staff of about 16. By its fourth year, enrollment is projected to quadruple, with seven more employees and a budget of about $3 million.

The school will have no geographic boundaries for attendance. Missouri’s legislation calls for the “sending district” — the district the teen lives in — to pay its usual per-pupil cost, with DESE making up the difference.

Vivo St. Louis’ per-pupil estimate for its first year is $31,000, about twice that of an average district. In subsequent years, Vivo's cost is projected to be $26,000 per pupil.

At the December meeting, Lisa Serino, a DESE assistant commissioner, cited long-term financing for the three schools as a concern. The state’s annual $3.4 million contribution from opioid settlement funds will be exhausted in five years.

“There’s a pot of money,” Serino said. “Eventually, it will be gone.”

The recovery schools’ student data — attendance rates and test scores — will not be included in Missouri’s annual performance reports for the teens’ home districts, but it will be submitted for federally required data reports.

Now that the St. Louis-area school has been approved, Vivo will work to secure a building from a list of four possibilities, Mouton said in an interview. She declined to identify the sites.

Brady Lindsey of Jefferson County said he would have appreciated a recovery high school when he got sober as a teenager. Instead, he had to finish his high school courses online.

"It was your sobriety or your education. I think if I had somewhere to go, I would have stayed in school," said Lindsey, 21. "There's a desperate need for something like that. There are a bunch of young people struggling out here with substance abuse."

Vivo St. Louis will be part of a presentation on substance abuse April 17 at the Clark branch of the St. Louis County Library, on South Lindbergh Boulevard. School leaders will be available to answer questions about registration.

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Blythe Bernhard of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

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