LAKEWOOD ACADEMY TAKING PROACTIVE APPROACH TOWARDS DRUGS, ALCOHOL

Lakewood Academy principal Rene Cashin knows as well as anyone what
kind of peer pressure students at schools all over the province are facing.

And included in those pressures are the influences of drugs, tobacco
and alcohol.

"If you don't believe that, you're sticking your head in the sand,"
Mr. Cashin told The Beacon last week. "So, if that's there, you have
to be aware that it's there, and you can either be proactive or reactive.

"You can either try to get the interventions in to help assist these
kids, or you can react when you've got a big problem."

For that reason, earlier this school year, Lakewood Academy began
participating in the DARE - Drug Abuse Resistance Program - program
with the Gander RCMP detachment.

Once a week, for eight weeks, Cpl. Ann Noel of the RCMP's drug and
organized crime awareness section, visits with the Grade 6 students
at the school, and each week, they discuss a different topic and find
a way to react when facing any one of those influences.

"It takes a student through a DARE decision-making model, which
allows them to know how to go into a difficult situation, whether it
be choosing the right movie to watch to whether or not they should
try cigarettes to trying drugs, alcohol, or bullying someone," said Cpl Noel.

It's an interactive program, she added, that supplies the students
with the facts on alcohol, drugs and tobacco, and by the end of the
eight weeks, they know how to respond to those situations.

"Without realizing it, they get to learn and understand what it's all
about," she said.

It is the younger groups that are the most impressionable, according
to Mr. Cashin, which is why students in Grade 6 at the school are the
ones participating.

In previous generations, he said children would often not be
introduced to drugs and alcohol until they reached Grade 8 or Grade
9. These days, they're introduced to that at younger ages.

"We've already had situations during the last two or three years
where we've had students in Grade 6 involved in smoking and drugs,"
said Mr. Cashin.

"We feel the need to make sure that we make these children aware of
what the consequences are, and to give them the educational
information, so they can make the informed decisions because right
now, most of them are following along with their peers, and in a
community our size, the peer of a Grade 6 student isn't a Grade 6
student; their peer is probably an older."

This is not the first time the school has been participating in the
program. Mr. Cashin said the school was associated with it a few
years ago. But now that it's back, the school hopes to keep providing
the program at the school for future Grade 6 classes.

The end result he hopes will be more and more students making a
lifelong commitment of making better decisions towards drugs and alcohol.

"Sometimes you don't think a decision you make in Grade 6 is going to
follow through for the rest of your life," he said. "... But if
you're able to affect change in the children young enough, they will
start affecting change in the adults as they start to grow."

It's an interactive program that supplies the students with the facts
on alcohol, drugs and tobacco...- Cpl. Ann Noel