Posted on 09/21/2003 9:12:10 AM PDT by Deadeye Division
DARE revises strategy for reaching children
Some police drop anti-drug lessons that critics call
ineffective
Sunday, September 21, 2003
John Futty
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
After years of examination and criticism, the DARE program is in the midst of revamping its strategy for preventing young people from abusing drugs and alcohol.
But the changes didn’t come fast enough in Columbus, where the Division of Police in July announced that it was pulling its Drug Abuse Resistance Education officers from the schools.
Chief James G. Jackson, a longtime critic of the program, said the division’s 10 DARE officers and one sergeant could be better used in "core policing services" that have suffered in a tight city budget.
Police departments from Fresno, Calif., to Palm Beach, Fla., have dropped their DARE programs in recent years, sometimes replacing them with drugprevention programs endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies.
In central Ohio, Worthington schools and Catholic Diocese schools lost their DARE programs when Columbus police pulled the plug. Both are searching for an alternative.
The Columbus Board of Education last week approved spending $168,000 to replace DARE with a program called Youth Matters, which will be taught by counselors to all district fifth-grade students.
But the the focus on fifthgraders generated most of the criticism aimed at DARE. Researchers said DARE failed to provide long-term benefits because it was not reinforced in middle and high schools, where peer pressure to use drugs and alcohol increases.
"What the studies showed was that an elementary-school DARE program, without any booster when the kids get older and are more at risk, is not effective," said Zili Sloboda, former director of prevention research for the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Sloboda, an adjunct professor at the University of Akron’s Institute for Health and Social Policy, is directing a program to develop a new DARE curriculum designed for use in the seventh and ninth grades. Her work is being funded with a $13.7 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The seventh grade program is available for use nationwide this fall. It was launched in 2001 in six major cities, where its effectiveness will be studied for five years among 19,000 students.
"The first-year results were very promising," Sloboda said.
The DARE program, taught by police officers and created by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1983, always has offered programs for middle- and highschool students, but they are rarely used.
An estimated 80 percent of the nation’s school districts use DARE in their elementary schools, but only about 25 percent use the program in middle schools and 15 percent in high schools, said Todd Wurschmidt, chief executive officer of the Dublin-based DARE Association of Ohio.
"You can’t expect students to retain anything without repetition," Wurschmidt said. "We don’t give students piano lessons in fifth grade, then have them stop practicing and expect them to perform a recital in the 12 th grade."
Dublin police have long preached the importance of stretching DARE through high school.
"We’re one of the few departments in central Ohio using it comprehensively," said Officer K.C. Jones, a school resource officer who teaches the program at Dublin Scioto High School.
Jones said a revised DARE curriculum was necessary.
In addition to the new middleand high-school program, DARE launched an updated elementary-school curriculum this fall. It reduced the number of weekly lessons from 17 to 10.
Fewer elementary-school lessons will give DARE officers time to offer programs in the middle and high schools, Wurschmidt said.
A time crunch is among the challenges facing DARE. As schools place an increased emphasis on preparing students for state proficiency exams and open their doors to programs battling issues such as teen suicide and teen pregnancy, there are limited hours available for drug- and alcohol-prevention lessons.
That’s what prompted the Oklahoma police to drop DARE in 1999 and develop its own antidrug program, known as Challenge, said Capt. Chris Woodruff.
"DARE is a great program in my opinion," he said. "But so many different programs wanted to come into the schools, it was chipping away at our time.
"We get our program done in six weeks. We’re still in the schools, still getting our message to the kids."
DARE also faces funding challenges, said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm.
"With tightening budgets, it’s getting increasingly difficult for schools and police departments to maintain ongoing funding for specific prevention programs," he said. "DARE is an easy target to cut because of the mixed reviews it has in terms of research on effectiveness."
Compounding the budget concerns is the federal government’s requirement — reinforced by the No Child Left Behind legislation — that substance-abuse funding be directed to programs that are "research-based," or proven effective through scientific studies.
Of the federal agencies that evaluate substance-abuse programs, none has endorsed DARE.
DARE officials hope that will change with the new curriculum.
In the meantime, the negative publicity about DARE’s longterm effectiveness has cost it the support of some police departments and school districts.
The Toledo police were reaching one-third of the city’s fifth grade with its three DARE officers when it decided to evaluate the program.
"Our planning and research unit did extensive research on DARE and found that it was not as successful as we had been led to believe," said Deputy Chief Derrick Diggs.
Toledo police replaced DARE with Keep A Clear Mind, a take-home drug-education program designed at the University of Arkansas.
Keep A Clear Mind was among the programs that Columbus schools officials reviewed before choosing Youth Matters, said Elaine Bell, executive director of student assistance, intervention and outreach.
But Columbus schools have no formal program in place to carry the message beyond the fifth grade.
"We have talked about how we can reinforce this information as our kids move on to middle school," Bell said. "We recognize this needs to be done."
DARE officials in Ohio said they don’t have figures to show whether the number of programs is declining.
"Have there been programs dropped? I’m sure there have," said Wurschmidt of the DARE Association of Ohio. "Has there been a dramatic impact? No."
Despite the criticism, DARE remains the most popular school-based anti-drug program, which is why the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation chose it for its research project.
"DARE is the only national network for prevention services," said Sloboda, the lead researcher for the new curriculum. "If we can develop an effective prevention program to be delivered by DARE, it has the potential to make a significant impact."
jfutty@dispatch.com
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