JACKSON TWP — Nurses in two schools in the Seneca Valley School District will be able to administer naloxone, an antidote for opioid overdoses, starting next school year.

The school board Monday night approved a new policy permitting nurses to administer naloxone, often referred to by the brand name Narcan.

Starting in September 2015 a state law allowed school nurses and security officers to carry and use naloxone. Police, firefighters, paramedics and friends or family members of at-risk people are also permitted to carry and use the antidote with immunity from prosecution.

Seneca Valley will have the drug in the high school and the intermediate high school as soon as it can get supplied by the state, school nurse Linda Starosta said.

Starosta said that naloxone is a life-saving drug, but not a drug that would enable drug users.

“It is not enabling. You cannot rehabilitate someone if they are dead,” she said.

The school nurses already have taken an online course, which is available to anyone, to be trained on naloxone, she said. It comes in nasal spray or an auto-injector.

Starosta said the antidote kicks in quickly and helps the patient breathe normally again.

“Opioids slow down everything in your body systematically, especially breathing,” she said.

The district already has two school resource officers who are both Jackson Township police officers who carry and are trained to administer the drug.

“Hopefully it will never be needed, but if it is needed, we will be prepared,” Superintendent Tracy Vitale said.