Maine just opened its first recovery high school for drug-addicted teenagers, and the press is celebrating — but nobody is asking why fentanyl has so thoroughly poisoned American youth that we need separate institutions just to keep them alive.

The Upper St. John Valley Recovery High School opened on the campus of the University of Maine at Fort Kent, in far northern Aroostook County. It is the only recovery high school in New England outside Massachusetts and the only one in a rural area in the entire country, according to the Association of Recovery Schools. The school is funded mostly by $616,000 in opioid settlement funds from the Maine Recovery Council — cash extracted from pharmaceutical companies after years of peddling addictive prescriptions.

Maine has the highest drug overdose death rate in the Northeast and among the highest in the country, per the CDC. That is the real story. Not the ribbon-cutting.

Brooke Nadeau, an educator who created the school, told the Portland Press Herald she wanted to make an impact beyond writing a 300-page dissertation. "I know if we can make a difference in just one child's life, it's going to be huge," she said. Claire Nichols, another backer, joined the board of Michael's Active Recovery in Fort Kent, named after Michael Anthony Robertson, a local man who died of an overdose while seeking support out of state.

These are real people doing what they can with what's in front of them. But what's in front of them is a crisis that bipartisan Washington created and refuses to fix. The opioid settlement dollars flowing to states like Maine are the direct result of regulators who looked the other way while pharmaceutical companies hooked a generation. Now that same system offers recovery high schools as the compassionate response — as if separating addicted teenagers from their peers and putting them in dorms is a victory rather than an admission of total societal collapse.

Nadeau acknowledged that stigma keeps some families from enrolling their children. "Some families know their child would benefit from a program like we're starting, but the stigma surrounding it is just too much to grasp," she told the Press Herald. None of the families agreed to speak to a reporter.

Meanwhile, the Breitbart and New York Post were busy covering a different education scandal entirely — a San Francisco high school where 94 percent of students flunk math but still boasts the highest UC Berkeley acceptance rate in the state, thanks to dropped testing requirements and grade inflation. Both stories share the same root: institutions lowering standards to accommodate failure, then calling it equity or compassion.

Ryan Paige, founder of AccessDirect Recovery Network in Biddeford, fields thousands of calls each month from around Maine and says there is no other option like this for young people in the state. That should alarm every American. When the only option left is a separate school for teenagers battling deadly addictions, the question isn't whether the school works. The question is who let it get this far — and why nobody in power is answering for it.