‘I was emotionally numb’: Virginia recovery academy student’s story of overcoming addiction

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, Va. (WRIC) -- Lexie was in middle school when she started smoking marijuana. Now, she's a high school junior on a sobriety journey alongside a dozen other students.

Every day she walks through the doors of Chesterfield Recovery Academy, expecting the support that she says has made her journey so far as successful as it has been.

"I have relapsed a couple of times," Lexie said. "But they're always like, 'You know, it's a part of recovery. And we're not just going to sit here and kick you out.'"

She said their approach—combining patience and nonjudgment—has made her feel cared for in a way she never did before her mom brought her to the recovery academy's doorstep.

That move, was preceded by Lexie getting caught smoking at her former high school, her mom mandating at-home drug tests, and her cheating said tests until, eventually, her luck ran out.

"So she was just like, 'I'm not going to send you to a school where you're just getting high every day,'" Lexie recounted.

At the time, Lexie said she'd so perfected numbing all her feelings that she didn't push back when her mom told her they were going to check out the recovery academy. In that regard, the constant marijuana use, had achieved exactly what she wanted.

"I was emotionally numb," Lexie said. "After I kept doing it, like, every day for months, I just was there. I didn't really have a lot of emotions ... I wanted to numb out all the personal problems I've been having and just you know, it was like the one thing that could really make me just forget about stuff and like, again, not care about the past problems or the problems I was having at that moment."

At Chesterfield Recovery Academy, Lexie said she's been learning not to run away from her feelings but instead find better coping mechanisms. At school, one of those tools, is a therapy dog named Valen. On one cold February day, after walking through the metal detectors, Valen was Lexie's first hello.

Valen, a therapy dog at Chesterfield Recovery Academy. (Photo: Forrest Shelor)

"Dogs lighten the mood," said Darien "Scott" Kay, Valen's handler and a member off the academy's teaching staff.

According to Kay, Valen was originally trained to assist people with disabilities or chronic illnesses that need monitoring. Kay said he knows about 40 different commands, including opening doors and turning off lights. But at the academy, being available to love on is his primary job.

And for Lexie and some of the other students, "Mr. Kay" is often able to help ease big emotions just as well as Valen.

Kay was teaching in a Chesterfield high school when he started thinking about how some of his students could benefit from the recovery schools he'd seen opening at an increasing rate across the country.

While the first recovery school, Sobriety High, opened in Minnesota in the late 1980s, there was no similar school in Virginia at that time. Kay wanted to help start one.

"Being in high schools, being in middle schools, I've seen the need," Kay said. "I've seen the access increase with different types of substances that students can get their hands on, on a regular basis now."

After sending a couple of emails to convey the need and potential solution, he quickly learned that the Chesterfield school district was already in the process of creating one themselves. He knew it would provide a lifeline similar to the one he'd once needed himself.

He recalled his own journey through recovery, which began when he was older than his students, when a cancer diagnosis and prescription pain medications devolved into substance use disorder. The moment he learned the recovery academy would be opening soon, he knew he had to leave the traditional school setting.

"Almost immediately, I knew that this is where I wanted to be," he said.

Kay has been on staff since the very beginning, as the school became the first of its kind in Virginia and a model for several other recovery academies in Virginia. The school—one of about a dozen recovery schools nationwide accredited by The Association of Recovery Schools—currently serves about a dozen students from across Central Virginia.

At times, Kay says they've served more than 30. And Lexie said she knows from experience that many more students in Chesterfield County alone need the services Chesterfield Recovery Academy has offered her.

In addition to clinical services, group therapy, peer mentoring and academic support, Kay said the most critical part is the ability of staff like him to be completely transparent as someone who's been in the students' shoes.

"I speak openly and honestly about it, where I probably wouldn't in a traditional classroom," Kay said. "But I am a person who got sober through peer recovery, so life changed for me."

Many of the challenges of overcoming addiction, he said, are the same at any age.

"It's the nonjudgmental way of understanding that I understand what you're going through," Kay said. "I understand that mentality that you have right now, and I understand why it's a struggle for you."

And for Lexie, she said even more powerful is not that Kay was once where she is now, but where he ended up—teaching, at the front of her classroom every day.

"You see where he is now and he's an amazing person and he like like he's successful now," she said.

Lexie plans to stay at the recovery academy through graduation next year.

The 2026 commencement will be the first since a student battling addiction could start there as a freshman and finish out their entire high school education in one place catered to their support needs.