LIVINGSTON DARE PROGRAM MAY END THIS SCHOOL YEAR

Sheriff Would Use Funds To Reassign Officer To Road Patrol

After this school year, the DARE drug-abuse education program run by
the sheriff in three Livingston County school districts could be a
thing of the past.

In his 2007 budget proposal, Sheriff Bob Bezotte plans to shift the
officer doing the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in the
Fowlerville, Hartland and Pinckney school districts - Deputy Debbie
Utter - to road patrol.

"The funds are getting increasingly hard to justify," Bezotte said.
"I think (DARE has) been a positive thing to have an officer involved
with the students. We've hung on for a lot longer than most people have."

Reassignment of the DARE officer is part of Bezotte's plan to beef up
patrols during nighttime hours. Two traffic-enforcement positions and
one person from the civil division also will be put on road patrol.

"Our priority is response times and trying to get to calls as quickly
as possible," Bezotte said.

Some educators, however, expressed disappointment at the sheriff's
decision, which has not been finalized by the county Board of Commissioners.

"We think that anything DARE can do to allow kids to make appropriate
choices is important," said Ed Alverson, superintendent of
Fowlerville Community Schools.

Rick Todd, principal of Pinckney Community Schools' Pathfinder
School, said the program has been in place in his district for about
10 years, and this year about 400 seventh-graders will go through it.
The program involves a police officer teaching classes on drug abuse
prevention.

Todd said some of the benefits include building relationships between
students and police; showing kids that the officers care about them;
stressing healthy lifestyle decisions; and fostering a positive image
of police.

There have been studies that call into question the effectiveness of
DARE, such as a 2004 report in the American Journal of Public Health
that analyzed data on the program and concluded that it was
ineffective in preventing drug and alcohol use.

But Todd said drug education is a lifelong process, more than a
"one-shot deal."

Statistics gathered by the local Substance Abuse Planning Ad Hoc
Workgroup show that youth in the county use drugs and alcohol at
higher rates than the national average.