There are two schools of thought in response to the recent move by the Seneca Valley School Board, authorizing school nurses to administer naloxone starting next academic year.

One view is that it’s the prudent thing to do.

Making the antidote for opioid overdoses, better known as Narcan, on hand will be like conducting routine fire drills — preparation for something we hope never happens. And for that matter, does anyone remembers an actual fire in a school building?

Their view is that it’s better to be prepared and never need the drug than it is to need it and not have it available.

The other view is shock and dismay that a student could be using heroin or other opiates. From this perspective, the Narcan is a surrender to moral and cultural decay.

These two views are practically opposite, yet they are equally valid — and both concerns should be represented in any permanent policy on the dispensing of Narcan in a public school setting.

The reality is that we are in the midst of an unprecedented opiate epidemic. According to a University of Pittsburgh Medical School study published earlier this year, an average of 110 legal- and illegal-drug overdose deaths occur every day in the United States.

Pennsylvania is among 20 states with a statistically higher rate of fatal overdoses than the national average, recording 2,458 deaths in 2014, the last year for which statistics are available.

There are two primary sources of opiates driving this market — legally prescribed pain medications and illegal heroin trafficking. The two sources are interrelated, particularly when the prescription runs out or the patient’s insurance no longer covers the prescription cost.

Opiates in any form are highly addictive, and a patient prescribed an opiate pain medication is 40 times more likely to try heroin than someone who has never taken a prescription opioid, according to the Pitt study — which, by the way, found that marijuana users are three times as likely to try heroin as nonusers.

The truth about this epidemic is that it’s still revealing itself — conditions will get worse before they get better. There’s no indication that the number of overdose deaths is slowing in Pennsylvania.

Isn’t it reasonable, if not even imperative, that we strongly hold both these points of view:

n It is alarming and disconcerting that opiates have become such an influence in our culture that we must supply school nurses with the antidote; and

n The first step in defeating this epidemic is keeping our children alive. Keep Narcan in schools. We can’t rehabilitate an already dead addict.

And let’s not lose sight of the objectives: Healthy children, safe families, eliminate drug dealers and crime-free communities.

Let’s agree that fire drills don’t mean the school is burning; neither does Narcan mean the kids are addicts. But let’s be vigilant against both and prepare for calamity that we pray will never come.