County Commissioners Spend Big on Calming Boxes
Calhoun County Commissioner Says Opioid Money Could Fund Drug Enforcement
At a January 14 meeting, the Hillsdale County Board of Commissioners voted to spend $40,973 from its opioid settlement fund, allocating the cash to most of the county’s public schools for the creation of “calming corners.”
Hillsdale County in particular is set to receive a reported $2.5 million from the settlement, paid out by the likes of Walgreen’s, Meijer and Johnson & Johnson. Funds have been and will continue to be appropriated by the Hillsdale County Opioid Committee, with the approval of the Hillsdale County Board of Commissioners.
Chris Firestone, a member of said committee, presented their latest idea to the board, arguing that calming corners are a good help to sedate children after they are “triggered” at school.
According to Firestone, the State of Michigan’s list of opioid remediation uses permits Hillsdale County’s money to be used for such “evidence-based prevention programs in schools.”
The report containing the “evidence” cites three different publications: a 2021 master’s thesis on mindfulness practices in education, penned by a student at Northwestern College, and two studies from the education bureaucracy promoting the use of calming corners in special education.
Commissioners Kevin Collins, Mark Wiley, Brent Leininger and Brad Benzing all voted for the safe space program. District 1 Commissioner Doug Ingles was the lone objection.
According to Wiley, who ran as a Republican in 2024, “$40,000 is not a huge number out of the amount of money that we've gotten from the opioid settlement.”
So far at least, it appears that Hillsdale’s Board of Commissioners are following the lead of Michigan’s urban counties in using the money to create new programs. Wayne County, for instance—a county which went for the Harris-Walz ticket at 62 percent in November—has opted to spend a portion of its money on an “anti-stigma media campaign.”
Other left-leaning counties in Michigan are using their money to “expand access” to “sterile syringes” for the “safe” injection of drugs—an idea that has gained some traction in Hilldale.
Yet in contrast to the Hillsdale Commissioners' roundabout approach to the drug problem, some counties have decided to address the issue head-on. Calhoun County, for instance, has already spent $75,930 of its money to bolster its regional drug law enforcement team.
Derek King, Calhoun commissioner and board chair, told the Hillsdalian that there are “so many ways” to spend the money, and “there’s so much of it.”
King emphasized that the restrictions on how the funds are spent are “pretty loose,” adding that Calhoun County had “no trouble” passing the measure allocating some of their money to law enforcement programs.
But the potential uses of the funds do not end there. According to King, “it’s something that could be utilized inside the jail, too.”
Jacob Bruns