Pubdate: Fri, 16 Feb 2001
Source: Alameda Times-Star (CA)
Copyright: 2001 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
Contact:  P.O. Box 28884 ,Oakland, CA 94612
Fax: (510) 208-6477
Website: http://www.timesstar.com/
Note: STAFF WRITER Josh Richman contributed to this report.

DARE TO BECOME MORE ROLE-PLAY ORIENTED

DARE, the nation's most widely used program to discourage drug use among 
schoolchildren, is getting a facelift as its leaders react to criticisms of 
inefficiency.

The new curriculum, unveiled Thursday, will focus on older students, and 
will move away from the "Just Say No"-based approach which has 
characterized the program since its inception. Rather than having students 
sit through lectures, the new curriculum will put more emphasis on using 
role-playing, building decision-making skills and having students question 
their assumptions about drug use.

Controlled studies of about 50,000 students will begin in six cities and 
their suburbs in the fall.

DARE -- which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education -- has grown so 
rapidly since its founding 18 years ago that it is now taught in 75 percent 
of school districts nationwide and in 54 other countries. Police officers 
who teach the program have become central figures in the lives of 
elementary school students, and the program's red logo has taken on iconic 
status on T-shirts and bumper stickers in thousands of communities.

Yet critics cited studies showing the costly program's impact was 
short-lived, spelling a frightful waste of educational and law enforcement 
resources.

Alameda County Schools Superintendent Sheila Jordan was an Oakland City 
Council member in 1995 when the city pulled the plug on its DARE program. 
At the time, Oakland was the largest city ever to withdraw from the 
program; Jordan and other city officials said they were convinced by 
studies showing DARE was less effective than other prevention programs and 
- -- at $600,000 per year -- too costly.

"My position was that although there are some very great aspects of the 
DARE program bringing police into the schools, it always seemed to be a 
misallocation of very valuable resources," Jordan said Thursday. "These 
were people working from a script replacing teachers in classrooms, versus 
doing what they were trained to do, which is work as police officers."

Jordan said she's glad the curriculum is being rethought to have police act 
more as facilitators than just scripted instructors.

"It's always good when you see a program responding to what the research 
shows, rethinking the way it delivers its service," she said, noting 
careful cost and efficiency analysis over time will determine the new 
curriculum's value. "People would be foolish to say 'This is the best thing 
since chicken soup' or 'No, this won't do' until we see it in action and 
look at the cost."

Alameda has graduated about 14,000 youths from its DARE program since 1989, 
and Officer Gary Self said he would hesitate to move the program from the 
fifth grade to the seventh.

"It's been proven ... that fifth grade is really the starting age, before 
you go into middle school, that's where the pressures are going to start 
hitting you," he said.

As for incorporating more role-playing and decision-making skills into the 
curriculum, Self noted that officers already are encouraged to play to 
their own teaching strengths when adapting the national DARE program for 
local use.

"We do all that anyway," he said. "But it sounds like now they want to put 
it in the curriculum."

But few DARE officers will argue with carrying the program into the high 
schools.

"I think it (DARE) needs to be continued on to high school -- a lot of the 
peer pressure these kids get starts in middle school but goes on in high 
school, too," said Officer Dave Batoy, one of the Pleasanton Police 
Department's two DARE officers. Batoy said with help from new school 
resource officers, that may become possible soon; for now, it's limited to 
fifth- and eighth-graders.

The new DARE program is being developed at the University of Akron in Ohio 
by Zili Sloboda, who as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse 
wrote a list of principles to guide drug-prevention programs. The program's 
development is underwritten by a $13.7 million grant from the Robert Wood 
Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy devoted to health care.

STAFF WRITER Josh Richman contributed to this report.
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