DARE DEFIES CRITICS AND RETAINS SUPPORT

The Drug-Abuse Education Program, Sharply Criticized In A Federal Report
Last Week, Has Both Opponents And Boosters In Rhode Island.

John Laboissonniere has been the Central Falls DARE officer long enough to
see the 11-year-olds he first taught grow into adolescents and adults --
some mature, responsible and law-abiding, some not.

He has no illusions that he has saved a whole generation, or made them
immune to peer pressure and the lure of alcohol and drugs. But he knows he
made an impact on the young people who call him "Officer John."

"I think people have to be naive to think that if a police officer is in a
classroom with kids for 17 weeks in fifth grade, that they're never going
to smoke or drink or do drugs," Laboissonniere said. "But I think
especially in the inner city, the important thing is to get a rapport with
a police officer," he added. "Inner-city kids most of the time see the
police in a negative way, and at least we give them an opportunity to see
the police as regular people, and see we can help them."

"I also build a rapport with the teachers, and all the teachers tell me
[DARE] helps to reinforce the effect of the health classes."

Last week, the U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report that
concluded, based on a review of six major studies of DARE, that it has "no
statistically significant long-term effect on preventing illicit drug use."

The finding is important because DARE -- Drug Abuse Resistance Education --
is offered in about 80 percent of U.S. school districts, according to the
report. In fiscal 2000, the federal government spent $2 million just
training new DARE police officers; it is unclear how much of the $439
million in federal Safe and Drug-Free Schools grants that year went to DARE.

Moreover, the report notes, there are many alternatives; the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has a list of 41 programs
that have been shown to "positively affect the majority of the intended
populations and produce a consistent pattern of results."

Why, then, is DARE still so entrenched in the schools?

Interviews with local school superintendents, police, and education experts
suggest that many factors are at play: inertia -- it's easier to stick with
DARE than to replace it; popular support; a lack of money or other
resources to pursue alternatives; and evidence that, when properly used,
the DARE program actually can help young people.

In Middletown, Schools Supt. Rosemarie Kraeger said she's familiar with the
studies questioning DARE's effectiveness, and she has seen both the
program's benefits and its shortfalls in her district.

Officer Ray Clancy has a good rapport with his fifth graders, she said, and
the DARE curriculum takes an honest and thorough approach to the "cruel
reality" of today's world. The children "understand the message," and at
the DARE "graduations," they "talk the talk."

But the students need more guidance, especially as they get older and start
facing the issues they discussed in DARE class, Kraeger said.

"We need some kind of follow-up," she said, adding that more parent
involvement would also be helpful. "I can see ways you could improve
[DARE], or make it more meaningful."

In Central Falls, Schools Supt. Maureen Chevrette said she has seen DARE
make a real difference.

"It has done a lot to improve the relationship between the kids and the
Police Department," Chevrette said. Laboissonniere is "well known by every
student he's had in class," she added, and the "very positive"
relationships he has built last well beyond fifth grade.

"I think it's really saved some kids from going down the wrong track -- not
necessarily with drugs, but in general," she said. "To me, it is worth
every minute that's spent."

Garrett Weber, a senior at Central Falls High School whom Laboissonniere
has enlisted as a role model for this year's fifth graders, said he found
DARE helpful -- not because he needed to learn that drugs were bad, but he
learned how to say "no" effectively.

"It made it easier," he said. "It didn't make it as awkward, because they
go over things you can say to people, and how they're going to respond, and
what to do about it." Not that his last DARE lesson was in fifth grade.

Laboissonniere "is always around, and he's always reminding people," Weber
said. And youngsters listen because "he's like a mentor or friend. He's
someone you can talk to. . . . He's very open and understanding about how
things are now. I think if the [DARE officer] was more uptight, kids
wouldn't have responded the way they did."

In Providence, police Lt. Paul Kennedy, who oversees the 10-officer school
squad, said his department quit DARE in the mid-1990s, and replaced it with
programs custom-made for the city's elementary, middle and high schools.

"We really didn't think it was effective for us," he said. The officers
also disliked DARE America's heavy marketing -- the push to buy DARE
pencils, T-shirts, and other promotional items.

At the elementary schools, school squad officers now give lessons on
everything from Halloween safety to drugs, alcohol, gangs and violence.

Until recently, they followed up in the upper grades with "Chances &
Choices," which used real-life stories to emphasize the importance of
making good, responsible decisions. But the video used in the program
featured former Chief Urbano Prignano Jr. and former Mayor Vincent A.
Cianci Jr., Kennedy said, so it's obsolete. Now Kennedy is considering a
new middle-school program, Gang Resistance Education and Training, which
focuses on violence and peaceful conflict resolution.

At the high schools, officers follow up with RESPECT, a locally developed
program that gets teens and the police to talk about their often difficult
rapport, and promotes mutual respect.

Ultimately, however, the most important thing the school squad officers do,
as Kennedy sees it, is be around, and get to know students.

George McDONOUGH, head of safe and drug-free schools programs for the state
Department of Education, said the key with DARE is to know what it can and
cannot do.

From the start, McDonough said, DARE's creators "did tell you that you had
to do booster lessons and follow-up." In fact, last week's GAO report
acknowledged that the studies it reviewed all looked only at the
fifth-grade program, even though DARE America offers materials for middle-
and high-school use, too.

Nevertheless, there are better approaches, McDonough said, with more
role-playing, and more long-term involvement. That's the "double-edged
sword" of having built community support for DARE, he said: "It's hard to
move something when people like it and they want to keep doing it."

Still, McDonough said, DARE isn't bad as long as it's not viewed as a
panacea, but rather supplemented with substance-abuse counseling and
programs to promote students' social and emotional development.

If DARE is "only a small part of a comprehensive prevention program," he
said, "I think it's not a waste of money. It can give kids good skills that
you can reinforce at a later level."

Bill Eyman, a state Department of Education staffer who advises schools on
ways to improve students' behavior, emotional health, and peer
relationships, also has mixed views.

Like McDonough, he said DARE isn't effective by itself. But it takes more
than extra programs, Eyman argued -- the key is to integrate DARE, or
whatever program,into the school's curriculum and culture.

"Any pullout program or special program that's not connected to the
classroom is less effective, because the tendency is to marginalize it,"
Eyman said. "One criticism of DARE is that it is presented by wonderful,
caring, charismatic police officers who really want to do a good job, but
it's not connected to school, so there's no support of their work, no
follow-through."

That's a common problem, Eyman said, and he himself has fallen victim to it
many times. The best programs, he has found, enlist teachers to participate
in the lessons, or at least complement them and follow up in class.

Even then it's hard, Eyman said, especially these days.

"Adolescents are very much swayed by a culture that is outside the family
and school," he said. "If they don't have very strong adult voices in their
lives, voices they respect, it's extremely hard to resist the general
culture and the youth culture."

In Central Falls, Laboissonniere has learned many of those things through
experience. He works closely with teachers, and they reinforce each other's
lessons. And he has taken cues from his audience, adapting his materials to
suit immigrants with limited English, and special-needs students.

He has even learned to use DARE marketing to the schools' advantage. With
his small budget, he buys classroom essentials, such as DARE pencils and
erasers -- "learning tools."

And he's trimmed the program down to 15 weeks, skipping some parts he finds
inappropriate for his students.

DARE America is issuing a new curriculum this year, he said, to reflect
social changes since the program was created in the 1980s, and he is eager
to see how it turns out. Asked whether, ideally, he would prefer a
custom-made curriculum, he was pragmatic.

"DARE already has the book, and it already has a lot of the tools," he
said. "I can do what I like and get rid of the stuff that I don't like. If
I had the time to sit down and come up with my own program, that would be
great, but you're talking money, and you're talking about a lot of
resources that I don't have."