The girl is from Colerain Township, but she hasn’t been home since she found her mother slumped over the toilet last year, high on heroin and barely conscious. Her father died of an overdose earlier this year.

, “I’m a Dream Believer.”

One man walks toward the glass doors at the clinic’s entrance with a sleeping baby on his shoulder and a girl in pajamas at his side. Two women with little boys follow a few minutes later. Then a man in a business suit. And a woman in a waitress uniform. And a young man walking his dog.

It sounds like she’s saying her son overdosed. But that can’t be right. Tommy has been doing great. He’s been free of heroin for a year now. He goes to meetings. He’s a mentor to others struggling with addiction.

Some of the women here have been using drugs most of their adult lives. Some are pregnant. Some have children.

“You’re not going to change me,” he says.

There have to be drugs in that car, he thinks.

Heroin is big business, but not for the Mexican immigrant Reagan is tailing today. He’s just a suspected courier who might make $500 or so. The real money flows to the gangs that control distribution, and to the drug cartels back in Mexico.

Now she’s standing before the judge, eyes sunken and hair tangled, leaning hard against the table.

There’s a 70-year-old Army veteran who stashed a bag of syringes in a basement crawl space. A Taylor Mill woman who tried to hide needles in her vagina after shooting up. A St. Bernard woman who overdosed when a friend injected her with heroin.

Their eyes are sunken, their hair a tangled mess

Doherty nods. He turns back to the page and writes a single word. Heroin.

Doherty crushes his cigarette and sits down to fill out a form for new residents, but he’s stumped by a question about his history with drugs. It’s a long history.

blue slippers

7:25 a.m.

There is only the struggle to endure and survive.

region’s greatest health crisis

And Middletown. And Norwood. And Hamilton. And West Chester Township. And countless other cities and towns across Ohio and Kentucky.

“If I wanted to take online classes, I would pay a lot less,” said Selby. “We’re paying full tuition to get an incomplete education.”

There’s also the problem of reliable internet access. Millions of Americans returning to their families in rural areas have no broadband access there, making online courses impossible for them. And as the wider shutdown caused by the virus cripples the economy, even households with broadband service might find it harder to afford if parents lose jobs.

Regardless of the pandemic’s effects, online education has been on the rise. Nearly 3.3 million college students, or 1 out of every 6, took only online classes in 2018, the last year for which the figure is available, according to Jeff Seaman, director of Bay View Analytics, which tracks online education. That was the highest percentage ever.

But adaptation has its limits. Washington and other schools are canceling classes that require hands-on training, such as some art and engineering courses.

The differences between a well-planned online course and a classroom-based course that’s forced to adapt can be sizable. With the former, professors use technology that allows group discussions, posting of materials and other interactive features

If university and college officials were worried that some of their students might not come back once they were moved from real-world classrooms to online education, the experience so far seems to suggest the opposite.

“I would not say I’m enjoying it,”

Madison Selby was already disappointed that her courses at the University of Washington were going online as part of the effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus. <img width="200" height="67" src="https://i2.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/icn-partner-pbs_newshour.png?fit=200%2C67&amp;ssl=1" class="attachment-200x999 size-200x999" alt="" loading="lazy" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/icn-partner-pbs_newshour.png?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/icn-partner-pbs_newshour.png?resize=205%2C68&amp;ssl=1 205w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px"> This story also appeared in PBS Newshour Then she got an email from a professor who said he’d rather cancel his last couple of classes than deal with the “dumpster-fire potential” of teaching remotely. This was not how Selby had imagined her last year of college.