DARE WORKING IN BLOOMINGTON-NORMAL EVEN IF FLUNKING ELSEWHERE

There is nothing yet that will convince the Bloomington-Normal people that
DARE programs are ineffective in fighting substance abuse by young people.

The Drug Abuse Resistance Education curriculum, developed in Los Angeles in
the 1980s, sends police into classrooms to warn children against drug and
alcohol abuse.

Normal has one part-time and two part-time DARE officers teaching in the
Unit 5 grade schools. Bloomington has two DARE officers working the grade
schools and junior high.

Both Normal Police Chief Walt Clark and Bloomington Police Chief Richard
Ryan are sold on the program because of the interaction between young people
and uniformed police officers as much as the drug education aspect. They
have no local studies to prove DARE is effective, just gut feelings and
feedback from students, their parents and school officials.

The Twin City experience seems to fly in the face of the recently released
DARE study from the University of Kentucky that basically echoes what an
independent study at the University of Illinois said last year. Researchers
found that there was no significant difference in the rate of drug abuse
among pupils from the studied schools that had DARE programs and pupils from
those that had none.

Studies from the University of Colorado and North Carolina's Research
Triangle Institute have arrived at the same conclusions.

There is no scientific evidence that DARE has any lasting impact on
substance abuse by youths, but the programs eat up millions of federal and
local dollars a year.

Perhaps part of the problem is that most DARE programs are in grade schools
only. That "Don't do drugs" message isn't carried over to all junior and
senior high schools when students are more likely exposed to drugs in cities
the size of Bloomington-Normal.

Clark would like to expand DARE to Unit 5's junior high schools, but in
conversations with school officials has found that there isn't enough time
in the school day for DARE to be incorporated without giving up some vital
classes.

But Ryan sees the cooperative effort between Normal and Unit 5 of having a
"school resource officer" in the high schools as the next step for DARE
programs. He sees that as different, but still an extension of DARE, a
program that he would like to institute at Bloomington High School.

Although uniformed police officers are important to interact with younger
students, Ryan doesn't think officers in the high school have to be in full
uniform and that they should do more than just encourage students to leave
drugs and alcohol alone.

He sees the resource officer as throwbacks to the days when Bloomington did
have an officer at BHS to interact with the students, not only in the
classrooms, but in the hallways and at school events.

Ryan is convinced that the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado would
not have occurred if there had been a resource officer to whom the students
thought they could talk in confidence. He thinks a police officer would
have been told of suspicions that students had but did not talk about until
after the shooting.

It's going to take more than a couple of studies to shake the Twin Cities
confidence in the DARE program. We want to think in communities this small
that DARE officers would have a pretty good idea whether their former
students are being arrested on drug/alcohol charges.

There is nothing sacred about the DARE name, just that the programs are
eligible for some federal funding.

At least in Bloomington-Normal, city officials ought to follow the gut
feeling of their police and school officials and not drop a program just
because it isn't working elsewhere.