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.