PLAYING IT S.A.F.E. County Replaces D.A.R.E. Program With A Local Anti-Drug Curriculum During a recent lesson in Keri Geibler's Howard County fifth-grade class, her students read from journal entries they had penned about peer pressure. One girl wrote about not wanting to join in a game of Truth or Dare with her friends. Another student tried to avoid participating in a rock-throwing prank with classmates. ``It's a little scary to stand up to your friends. ... It's scary to say, 'I don't want to do that,' '' Geibler said. Geibler was discussing peer pressure with her Centennial Lane Elementary School students as part of a 10-lesson drug and alcohol education unit called Stopping Abuse for Everyone (SAFE) that will be taught to all fifth-graders in Howard County this year. The school district's own faculty wrote the curriculum, which was used in two elementary schools in 1998 as a pilot project and expanded to 10 elementary schools last year. Howard's SAFE program transplants the well-known national Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program that has been taught by police officers at schools in the county since the late 1980s and still reaches more than 26 million students nationally. Howard joined three other school districts in Maryland that have dropped D.A.R.E. since 1994 because of frustrations over its restrictive curriculum and officer manpower shortages. Harford County dropped D.A.R.E. in 1999 and now teaches sixth-graders its own anti-drug unit called ``Project Alert.'' Frederick County dropped D.A.R.E. in 1996 and adopted an anti-drug program developed in Montgomery County, which is used there in conjunction with D.A.R.E. Baltimore City dropped the program in its schools in 1994 because of police staffing shortages. Although other school districts in the region--in Montgomery, Anne Arundel County and Southern Maryland--say they're happy with D.A.R.E. and have no plans to change, the program has struggled lately in the wake of recent national studies that have questioned D.A.R.E.'s effectiveness. A 1999 study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that children who took the 17-week D.A.R.E. course in elementary school used drugs and alcohol at the same rate 10 years later as those who learned about drugs and alcohol in traditional health classes. The study noted an ``absence of beneficial effects associated with the D.A.R.E. program.'' D.A.R.E. America, the program's Los Angeles-based parent organization, dismissed that study as ``voodoo science.'' The state coordinator for D.A.R.E., Sgt. Gary Chatfield of Maryland State Police, said he was not surprised that several school districts dropped D.A.R.E. Participation in the program peaked in 1993, when all 24 Maryland counties were using D.A.R.E. Chatfield said he doesn't think any more school districts will drop the program, even in view of recent studies. ``Everybody's looking for a quick fix and fast results. There is no quick fix,'' Chatfield said. ``D.A.R.E. is a terrific platform. It provides a start for students to begin thinking about these problems.'' Officer staffing shortages may continue to be a problem in some school districts. Russell Lancaster, the supervisor for safe and drug-free schools in Prince George's County, said the police department has reduced the number of officers it was supplying for D.A.R.E., forcing the school system to downscale its D.A.R.E. program from 110 schools last year to about 70 this year. Dulcy Sullivan, Howard's resource teacher for safe and drug-free schools, said that the school district began developing its own drug education curriculum five years ago. Some school administrators thought Howard County police was not staffing the D.A.R.E. program with enough officers to keep up with a rapidly increasing school enrollment. The 17-week, tightly scripted D.A.R.E. program must be taught by police officers, and D.A.R.E. America allowed little deviation from that. ``It had to be D.A.R.E. their way or no D.A.R.E. at all,'' Sullivan said. The new program, SAFE, uses many of the same concepts discussed in D.A.R.E.--media influences, consequences of drug and alcohol abuse, resistance techniques--but incorporates more reading and writing opportunities for students. Howard teachers present six of the 10 SAFE lessons; police officers the other four. Geibler said she thinks SAFE is more productive than D.A.R.E. because it allows the teacher to interact with students on what she described as critical moral issues of right and wrong. Further, she said SAFE allows students to keep a journal so they are able to write and contribute their own thoughts about drugs and alcohol and temptation. ``It goes in with what we're doing in all other subjects, writing and group work,'' Geibler said. ``It's really natural.''
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