IOWANS FIND DARE WORKS

A Recent Study Doubted The Overall Effectiveness Of The Drug Program.

One of the country's most popular drug-education programs remains in full
force in Iowa, even though a new study says students who participate in
DARE are no more likely to avoid drug use than children who don't complete
the program.

Researchers at the University of Kentucky determined that the Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program has no long-term effect on drug use among the
students it aims to educate. The study, published earlier this month, was a
follow-up to an earlier Kentucky study that had similar findings.

DARE, created in 1983 by Los Angeles police officers, is a 17-hour program
that is led by police officers in school classrooms. It teaches students
how to avoid using tobacco, alcohol and other drugs, how to raise their
self-esteem and how to resist peer pressure.

The program entered Iowa classrooms 11 years ago, and organizers say 80
percent of the state's students now participate in it.

"If you really want to know if DARE works, and if you really care, go into
a classroom," said Story County Sheriff's Deputy George McGuire, the
program's Iowa president. "For every negative study, there are many
positive things that come out of it."

DARE didn't keep Mariah Danner, 17, from taking drugs, but she says it
helped her stop.

Danner, of Storm Lake, remembers a DARE officer visiting her elementary
school to talk about the dangers of drugs. The officer was a "nice guy,"
she said.

Danner began smoking marijuana with her friends earlier this year, she
said. She smoked daily after school.

"I knew how drugs affected you," she said. "The DARE officer taught us how
drugs affected us. I spent a lot of time thinking about how drugs are bad,
but I tried it. I just thought I'd like it."

Danner, who has spent more than two months in a drug-treatment program and
plans to attend college soon, said her DARE training made her think about
the effects of smoking marijuana. She said she might have avoided drugs if
she had continued in the DARE program in junior high and high school.

"I probably would have felt guilty," she said.

The Kentucky study questioning DARE's effectiveness was published in the
August issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Researchers studied about 1,000
students who participated in DARE as sixth-graders in 1987.

Ten years later, the study said, the program had "no significant positive
effect" on the students' attitudes toward drug use.

DARE and similar programs made students warier about drugs, but the effects
didn't last, the study said.

Program officials - nationally and in Iowa - are quick to defend the
program and criticize the study.

Leaders say that the program has improved significantly since 1987, when
the students in the study were participating. Officials say DARE was
designed for elementary school students but has expanded to include
programs for children in kindergarten through 12th grade.

In Iowa, 407 of the state's public and private school districts use the
program. Most of the districts use it for elementary students, but several
have added programs in junior and senior high schools, McGuire said.

"There's no way you can put the DARE program in the bad category, " he
said. "So why do people try to attack it? School districts don't drop it,
because the administrators stop in the classroom and see that this is a
good thing."

Patti Ford, who coordinates drug-education programs for the Council Bluffs
school district, said DARE is working for the district's sixth-graders. But
drug education is taught before students enter the program, and it is
reinforced in each grade afterward, she said.

"We never claim it's going to be the all-purpose answer to drug problems,
but it puts kids in touch with an officer they can trust," Iowa Falls
Police Chief Rock Reeves said.

Don Farrell of Vail says people have too much confidence in DARE. "Any time
you implement a program that is supposed to do something, people tend to
think this problem is taken care of."

Some research backs the program. A 1998 study of 3,190 Ohio 11th-graders
found that students who participated in DARE or similar programs were less
likely to use drugs.

In Iowa, the Story County sheriff's office and Mary Greeley Medical Center
studied 232 Story County eighth-graders last year.

Their study also found that students who had not completed a DARE program
were more likely to have at least experimented with drugs or alcohol.

DARE "doesn't turn every kid into a perfect angel," McGuire said. "But once
in a while it will help a kid make a good decision."

Central Iowa

Two of Iowa's largest school districts, Ames and Des Moines, don't
participate in DARE and instead have their own drug-prevention programs
taught by teachers and counselors rather than police officers.

* IN AMES: Drug-education programs are taught in the classroom by teachers.
"We're not against the program," said W. Ray Richardson, deputy
superintendent of Ames schools. "There are a lot of things that are part of
the DARE program that we've integrated into our own drug-education programs."

Richardson said administrators in Ames chose not to participate in the DARE
program when it became available in Iowa classrooms because they thought
students could learn about drugs as effectively from teachers as from
police officers.

* IN DES MOINES: The school district has drug-education programs for
students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Teachers and counselors also
teach anger-management and self-esteem skills, school officials said. At
least one elementary school, Hanawalt, has a DARE program, but it is
supported and paid for by the school's PTA, not by the school district,
Superintendent Eric Witherspoon said.