If it had happened at a Birmingham school the events would have splashed across the headlines.

With comments from readers about a system doomed to fail.

If it had happened in Montgomery or Huntsville, Mobile or any one of 160 school systems, we'd have heard about the perils and pitfalls of public schooling, about the failures of teachers and principals and of course parents.

But this is not that story. This is about what - as best we can tell -- happened in February at a very private and very prominent suburban Birmingham Christian school.

The talk began weeks - now months ago. Parents at Briarwood Christian High School began to call and write about a drug raid at the school. Students were identified and cell phones seized. It was marijuana we heard, and LSD and even heroin, right there in the school that describes its "compelling trait" as a climate "where students are spiritually and intellectually equipped to serve Christ."

Drugs. Imagine.

Parents begged for answers and so did we. At least half a dozen messages to Superintendent Barrett Mosbacker went unanswered. Others at the school said Mosbacker was the only one who could comment, and the Shelby County Sheriff's office said there was nothing the department could talk about.

Silence. Nothing to see here.

Because we are to pretend drugs don't exist in the affluent zip codes, because drug abuse cannot be acknowledged in the pursuit of the Christ-centered life. Because everybody is better off if we pretend that problem is ... somebody else's problem.

Briarwood school

But last month Mosbacker sent parents an email explaining that some Briarwood students had been involved. Law enforcement took the lead, he said, and Briarwood just got caught up in the fray.

"Their primary focus was not our students," Mosbacker wrote of investigators. "Rather, it was gathering information on drug dealers so they could be taken off the streets. Because law enforcement agencies took the lead on the investigation and did not want to tip off suspects, and because we were dealing with minors and their parents, we were not at liberty to communicate even the slightest bit of information until after the conclusion of the investigation."

I tried to ask Mosbacker about the email, but of course he did not return that call either.

He did point out to parents that "It is important to know that BCS was not the epicenter of this situation. The epicenter was elsewhere but sadly, some of our students were caught up in it."

How many? We don't know.

What drugs and how prevalent? We don't really know.

Multiple students were expelled, but we don't know how many. One teenager was arrested, but we don't know why.

The sheriff's office deferred to the school and the school to the sheriff's office. And nobody said a thing.

Mosbacker did encourage parents to pray for the students, to pray they will use the situation as a warning. He urged them to check their child's phones, to know their passwords and set limits.

He did not encourage them to talk about it. On the contrary. The message to students, he wrote, included the admonition to "avoid gossip."

The problem, of course, is that silence fuels the belief and the expectation that the plague of drug abuse does not happen in the affluent zip codes, or among the churched, or the vigilant, or the exceptional.

But we know better.Of course it can happen at Briarwood. It can happen anywhere.

We know the heartache of heroin is a deadly epidemic across the state and the nation. In the Birmingham area, deaths from the drug rose 140 percent last year, and deaths continue at such a rate that one law enforcement official called the drug "Satan."

So Briarwood prayer is welcome.

But silence and avoidance is not. Drug use and abuse happens everywhere, in every community, income level and walk of like. The only disinfectant to a scourge such as that - as is so often the case - is sunlight.

Let it shine. Even in Briarwood.