FINDING NEW WAYS TO JUST SAY NO

Despite Revisions, Some Schools Are Opting Out Of DARE To Try Antidrug
Alternatives.

For 10 years, Collingswood police officers have stood in the town's
fifth-grade classrooms, lecturing about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.

And for 10 years, they have followed the same DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance
Education) workbook used by 36 million children nationwide, giving 17
lessons on topics such as how to resist peer pressure and different ways to
say no.

But as the DARE graduates ascended through high school, the local police
were still hauling in teenagers for drinking on weekends. A survey
indicated that the number of students drinking and using drugs in
Collingswood had actually increased in the previous five years. And they
were starting earlier, with 28 percent of eighth graders reporting they had
been drunk in 1998-99, compared with 11 percent in 1995-96.

"It wasn't enough," said Patrolman Steve Rydzewski, who has taught DARE for
the last four years. It was unrealistic, he said, to think lessons for
10-year-olds would be enough to prevent beer bashes in high school.

Collingswood is one of a handful of communities across the country that are
dropping the DARE program, to replace it with a more comprehensive program
aimed at reaching students from first grade on up to 12th.

Although DARE is used in 75 percent to 80 percent of the nation's school
districts, its worth had been increasingly challenged by parents,
researchers and government officials. In the last two months, reports from
the surgeon general and the National Academy of Sciences found the program
ineffective.

In the past, DARE officials staunchly defended their program. But last
month, DARE America announced a major revamping and expansion,
acknowledging its programs were outmoded.

"It wasn't working as well as it should, or as well as it needed to," said
Herbert D. Kleber, the chairman of DARE's scientific advisory board, which
studied the program and met with its major critics over the last several years.

The revised DARE program, funded through a $13.7 million grant from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will be introduced to 50,000 schoolchildren
in six cities this fall. The program will be expanded from its traditional
base in fifth grade to include seventh and ninth grades.

Police officers will still visit classrooms, but they will use updated
teaching and prevention methods. They will have students work in groups to
research the drug ecstasy, instead of listening to a lecture. Or they will
use neuroscience imaging of brain slices to show what drugs can do to the
circuitry of an adolescent brain.

After a two-year test run and a subsequent evaluation, the curriculum will
be offered nationwide.

DARE, founded 18 years ago by the Los Angeles Police Department, is a
voluntary program between schools and police funded primarily by the
departments, which donate the time of the DARE officers.

"We looked at DARE and found the content may not be right, but it is the
largest-scale distribution system in place in the nation," said Nancy J.
Kaufman, vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "We can fix
the content. DARE is our best possible chance of delivering the message."

Collingswood is one community that will be not be delivering the DARE
message in elementary or high school. It is developing and delivering its
own drug-prevention program, called Sunrise.

The program is a collaborative venture that resulted from meetings of
borough, police and school officials with parents and the staff of Genesis,
a counseling center in the borough.

"Our thinking is you need more than a DARE program in the schools," said
Gabe Guerrieri, executive director of Genesis. "We need the school, the
police, the town and the parents to be on the same page, working together,
following the same plan."

Besides DARE, there were already efforts and programs in place - including
a substance-abuse counselor and health-class discussions - but no single
thread running through so everyone could work together, Guerrieri said.

Sunrise, also partially financed by Robert Wood Johnson, will begin full
scale in the fall, offering drug prevention in the schools in grades one
through six. In the middle and high schools, the program will shift to a
more intensive intervention program.

For instance, if students are caught drinking beer or using drugs, they
will have the option of entering a counseling program with their parents
instead of facing a criminal complaint and a school suspension.

"We're hoping to reach the kids who use and abuse pretty heavily,"
Guerrieri said. "We know we've got a lot of kids who are opening themselves
up for addiction problems."

To be successful, he said, the program must change attitudes: from the
younger students who hear that everyone drinks in high school, to the high
school students who drink or do drugs to fit in, to the parents who believe
that high school drinking is a rite of passage.

"Some parents say, 'It's just a phase. Let the kids alone.' Or, 'I'm
teaching my kid to drink responsibly,' " Guerrieri said. "But I say, if I
expect my kids to drink, they will drink."

The elementary program is being tested this year, with psychotherapist
Michele Rattigan accompanying Rydzewski to fifth-grade classrooms in the
hope that her presence will make the class more effective.

"DARE teaches facts and statistics," said Karen Hoisington, Sunrise program
director. "We are hoping that instead of teaching facts in a book, we will
challenge their assumptions, and teach them to think."

In the fifth-grade classroom at Zane-North Elementary School the other day,
there was a glimpse of how the class might be different under the new program.

During the lesson, the students were asked if they would change themselves
to fit into a group. The expected answer was no - they would be true to
themselves. Most of the children answered as expected.

But one girl raised her hand and said, "It depends."

Rattigan asked her to explain.

"I want to be on a basketball team," she said. "And I might have to
practice harder and get better to make it."

That launched a discussion about how not all peer pressure is bad, that
often friends and teammates can inspire positive change and help one
another through rough spots.

Over the years, Rydzewski has taught the peer-pressure lesson to hundreds
of youngsters. He has taught the different kinds of peer pressure:
friendly, teasing, direct. He has taught all different kinds of ways to
resist the pressure of peers.

But the idea that peers can also pressure friends to stay out of trouble,
that peer pressure can be good, was not in the DARE curriculum.

"In four years," he said, "it never came up."