PLAYING IT S.A.F.E.

County Replaces D.A.R.E. Program With A Local Anti-Drug Curriculum

During a recent lesson in Keri Geibler's Howard County fifth-grade class,
her students read from journal entries they had penned about peer pressure.

One girl wrote about not wanting to join in a game of Truth or Dare with
her friends. Another student tried to avoid participating in a
rock-throwing prank with classmates.

``It's a little scary to stand up to your friends. ... It's scary to say,
'I don't want to do that,' '' Geibler said.

Geibler was discussing peer pressure with her Centennial Lane Elementary
School students as part of a 10-lesson drug and alcohol education unit
called Stopping Abuse for Everyone (SAFE) that will be taught to all
fifth-graders in Howard County this year. The school district's own faculty
wrote the curriculum, which was used in two elementary schools in 1998 as a
pilot project and expanded to 10 elementary schools last year.

Howard's SAFE program transplants the well-known national Drug Abuse
Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program that has been taught by police
officers at schools in the county since the late 1980s and still reaches
more than 26 million students nationally.

Howard joined three other school districts in Maryland that have dropped
D.A.R.E. since 1994 because of frustrations over its restrictive curriculum
and officer manpower shortages.

Harford County dropped D.A.R.E. in 1999 and now teaches sixth-graders its
own anti-drug unit called ``Project Alert.'' Frederick County dropped
D.A.R.E. in 1996 and adopted an anti-drug program developed in Montgomery
County, which is used there in conjunction with D.A.R.E. Baltimore City
dropped the program in its schools in 1994 because of police staffing
shortages.

Although other school districts in the region--in Montgomery, Anne Arundel
County and Southern Maryland--say they're happy with D.A.R.E. and have no
plans to change, the program has struggled lately in the wake of recent
national studies that have questioned D.A.R.E.'s effectiveness.

A 1999 study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that
children who took the 17-week D.A.R.E. course in elementary school used
drugs and alcohol at the same rate 10 years later as those who learned
about drugs and alcohol in traditional health classes. The study noted an
``absence of beneficial effects associated with the D.A.R.E. program.''
D.A.R.E. America, the program's Los Angeles-based parent organization,
dismissed that study as ``voodoo science.''

The state coordinator for D.A.R.E., Sgt. Gary Chatfield of Maryland State
Police, said he was not surprised that several school districts dropped
D.A.R.E. Participation in the program peaked in 1993, when all 24 Maryland
counties were using D.A.R.E. Chatfield said he doesn't think any more
school districts will drop the program, even in view of recent studies.

``Everybody's looking for a quick fix and fast results. There is no quick
fix,'' Chatfield said. ``D.A.R.E. is a terrific platform. It provides a start
for students to begin thinking about these problems.''

Officer staffing shortages may continue to be a problem in some school
districts. Russell Lancaster, the supervisor for safe and drug-free schools
in Prince George's County, said the police department has reduced the
number of officers it was supplying for D.A.R.E., forcing the school system
to downscale its D.A.R.E. program from 110 schools last year to about 70
this year.

Dulcy Sullivan, Howard's resource teacher for safe and drug-free schools,
said that the school district began developing its own drug education
curriculum five years ago. Some school administrators thought Howard County
police was not staffing the D.A.R.E. program with enough officers to keep
up with a rapidly increasing school enrollment.

The 17-week, tightly scripted D.A.R.E. program must be taught by police
officers, and D.A.R.E. America allowed little deviation from that.

``It had to be D.A.R.E. their way or no D.A.R.E. at all,'' Sullivan said.

The new program, SAFE, uses many of the same concepts discussed in
D.A.R.E.--media influences, consequences of drug and alcohol abuse,
resistance techniques--but incorporates more reading and writing
opportunities for students. Howard teachers present six of the 10 SAFE
lessons; police officers the other four.

Geibler said she thinks SAFE is more productive than D.A.R.E. because it
allows the teacher to interact with students on what she described as
critical moral issues of right and wrong. Further, she said SAFE allows
students to keep a journal so they are able to write and contribute their
own thoughts about drugs and alcohol and temptation.

``It goes in with what we're doing in all other subjects, writing and group
work,'' Geibler said. ``It's really natural.''