As teen drinking rates reach historic lows across the U.S., Kinkaid’s Upper School students
seem to be trending in the opposite direction.

“In national surveys, alcohol consumption is the lowest it’s been in adolescents in a while,” said Dr. Laura Lomax-Bream, Kinkaid’s Director of The McGuyer Family Center for Wellbeing and Success.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, alcohol use declined among 10th graders surveyed in 2024, with 26.1% of sophomores reporting alcohol use in the past 12 months as compared to 30.6% in 2023. Likewise, 41.7% of 12th graders reported alcohol use in the past
12 months as compared to 45.7% in 2023. The NIDA funds a yearly national survey, “Monitoring The Future,” which looks at the substance use behaviors of eighth-graders and high school sophomores and seniors who self-report for the study.

Looking at ninth-graders through 12th-graders in Kinkaid’s Upper School, a study by Authentic Connections reported that Kinkaid’s high schoolers showed a larger percentage of alcohol use on average as compared to other schools AC surveyed.

“We do follow the norms in terms of the fact that our use starts out the lowest in 9th grade and gets higher through the senior year, with our highest use occurring in the 12th grade,” Dr. Lomax-Bream said. “Across all grades in these two alcohol categories, we tend to be at about double the national average.”

Specifically, the national average for high schoolers who reported being drunk in the last 30 days was 4.6% in 2024 among students at the 441 AC schools that participated in the study. For the same measure, 10.9% of Kinkaid high schoolers reported having been drunk in the last 30 days that year. For the AC schools in 2024, 7.4% of students on average reported clinically significant use of alcohol in the last 30 days as compared to Kinkaid’s average of 14.8%.

“When I saw those statistics I was shocked,” junior Molly Jane Dunn said.

In 2025, the national averages improved for AC schools, including Kinkaid. That year, the national average was 4.1% as compared to Kinkaid’s average of 8.2% of students who reported being drunk in the last 30 days. Following the same downward trend, in 2025, the national average of AC schools was 6.7% as compared to Kinkaid’s average of 12.3% for clinically significant use of alcohol in the last 30 days.

“The main reason people try alcohol is because it’s an entry point into social experiences,” Dr. Lomax-Bream said. “Really, there are still far more kids choosing to stay healthy than they notice, but intoxicated people tend to make an enormous display of themselves and create the appearance that their behavior is very widespread. We often say, nobody comes on the news and reports about all the planes that landed safely today. They only cover the actual plane crashes…”

For sure, to some students, alcohol use has been about social perception.

“When I was in middle school, I would watch movies about high schoolers,” said Xenia Ento, a Kinkaid student given a fake name for anonymity. “These movies always consisted of alcohol and partying. It made alcohol seem normal.”

Early substance use often leads to increased risk of substance use disorder, hindering brain development and allowing tolerance build-up. In the 2025 version of the study “Maturation of the
Adolescent Brain,” researchers reported that younger teenagers don’t form a fully developed prefrontal cortex until the age of 25, and alcohol severely hinders this development and increases addiction factors.

“I think most people know drinking is bad for you, but they don’t really think about what it does to your brain while it’s still developing,” Ento said.

According to a NIH study of rats, drinking alcohol causes a dopamine boost and makes people gain a false sense of feeling indestructible. Teenagers can suffer greatly from this as it keeps them from forming meaningful relationships or enjoying their lives outside of alcohol. “Alcohol is scary. How can a liquid, common in many drinks, cause so much suffering? It’s like a person loses the chance to live a fulfilling life if they become addicted,” Ento said, reflecting on the risks of drinking.

School Address Alcohol Use

In the quest to address alcohol consumption, Kinkaid’s leaders have been finding ways to discuss the downsides of alcohol use and how it can negatively impact people’s lives.

School leaders have brought in former alcohol addicts to assemblies, where they shared their experiences with alcohol and how it caused their life to change in negative ways.

Through The McGuyer Family Center for Wellbeing and Success, Dr. Lomax-Bream has also discussed the impacts of alcohol use and how people should find other ways to socialize and enjoy life as a high schooler. She has also presented data about Kinkaid’s students’ use of alcohol to keep the community informed.

The data Kinkaid received underscores how early habits can begin and evolve.

Behind every percentage point is a student whose curiosity, pressure or experimentation may lead them down an uncertain or undesirable path.

“Intoxicated peer behavior makes a much bigger impression on the brain, so we grossly overestimate how much that is happening,” Dr. Lomax-Bream said. “Don’t get me wrong, we are doing far too much underage drinking, but still far less than what most of our students estimate to be the case.”

STUDENTS SPEAK OUT

How do you think students could avoid or reduce alcohol usage?
How could students break free from addiction/overuse?

Upper School journalism and yearbook teacher Dr. Kimetris Baltrip assisted with the reporting of this article.