AUSTIN POLICE KICK DRUG PREVENTION PROGRAM

The DARE Debate

DARE, the world's most popular drug prevention program, just lost another
customer. The city of Austin is the latest in a series of large cities --
including Seattle, Washington, and Oakland, California -- to ditch the
high-dollar program, which costs about $750 million annually to administer
across the United States. Although DARE's bumper stickers, t-shirts, and
gimme caps (dubbed "DARE-aphernalia" by detractors) will long remain
ubiquitous in Austin, the police department will eliminate its program
starting this school year -- a victim, depending on who you talk to, of
resource problems, or its own ineffectiveness.

>From a manpower perspective, growing numbers of vacancies in the Austin
>Police Department ranks led to a reassessment of the program, to which the
>city allocated $500,000 in 1997. Austin has not received federal funding
>for the program in the last two years.

"Obviously, [DARE] takes officers off the streets," says Assistant Police
Chief Bruce Mills. "We don't mind [putting officers in schools] when we can
afford to
but given the number of vacancies, we can't find the officers."
In addition, Mills says, the nationally standardized curriculum is too
rigid, requiring officers to stick to a single, invariant script. "DARE has
very limited curriculum requirements," he says. "We are looking for
something you can specialize for a certain district or a certain class." At
the same time, Mills says, his department is aware of nagging concerns
about DARE's effectiveness. "If you ask, `Is there a better way to impart
knowledge about drugs?' the answer is, `We don't know.'
The feeling is
that [DARE] is not the panacea for drug education."

DARE's defenders say that critics are too quick to point fingers at the
program for failing to prevent teen drug use. Instead, they say, detractors
should look to the world outside the classroom, where popular culture,
advertising, and increasing drug availability make a utopian world without
gangs or drugs impossible. "DARE is just a piece of the puzzle," says
six-year DARE veteran Mike Alexander, an A.P.D. sergeant. "It works only
for a moment. If the kids go out and there is nothing to combat everything
they hear, they lose it."

Daryl Gates' Brainchild

Started in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department as a pet project of
former police chief Daryl Gates, DARE has since spread like kudzu across
the United States. The program's 17-week core curriculum, whose lessons
have titles such as "Building Self-Esteem" and "Learning Assertiveness," is
firmly entrenched in some 75% of school districts nationwide, and 44
foreign countries have versions of DARE in place. Although several cities
have dropped the program, others have rushed in as if to fill a vacuum,
with New York City the most widely publicized new addition. The program, in
which trained officers take over the classroom once a week to teach fifth
and sixth graders how to resist drugs and violence, has proved virtually
resistant to criticism, at least on a national scale. Since 1988, one day
per year has been set aside by presidential decree as "National DARE Day,"
an event at which public servants typically herald DARE's overwhelming
success in hurtling itself into school districts and public consciousness.

But the obvious question -- does DARE work? -- is seldom if ever whispered
in the halls of power where budgets are made and presidential orders
decreed. Several studies -- including one commissioned by the U.S.
Department of Justice and later discarded as "methodologically unsound" --
have indicated that it does not. The most often-cited study, a statistical
analysis of all known DARE research conducted by North Carolina's Research
Triangle Institute in 1994, concluded that "DARE's limited influence on
adolescent drug use behavior contrasts with the program's popularity and
prevalence."

Closer to home, an Austin municipal audit the same year concluded that DARE
had no effect in preventing drug-related crimes by juvenile offenders.
Meanwhile, juvenile drug use has continued to rise, with 25% of high school
students reporting monthly use of illegal drugs in 1996-1997 -- up 2% from
the previous year. With 75% of all American children receiving some form of
DARE in their education diet, it appears that school districts and police
departments are spending more and getting less than ever.

Although DARE literature asserts that the program "supplies the young
students with the skills necessary to resist" such cultural pressures, its
defenders says that no 17-week program will prevent drug use three or five
years down the line.

But if that's the case, why not start DARE, say, in junior high, when kids
are at their most impressionable? Charlie Parsons, director of DARE
America, which distributes DARE curriculum, workbooks, and those
omnipresent bumper stickers, says that the program "was designed to try to
get to children before they had experimented. The easiest way to quit is
never to start."

David Williams, state coordinator with the Texas DARE Institute in San
Marcos, which administers the DARE program statewide, adds that school
districts themselves may be to blame. DARE's full 13-year program, which
focuses on fifth or sixth grade but puts cops in classrooms from
kindergarten on, must be implemented in its entirety to be effective, he
says. "Reinforcement is what makes all programs effective," he says. "When
DARE is put in place properly and implemented and reinforced properly, it
is effective."

Few studies exist to back up Williams' claim, in large part because few
school districts have adopted DARE's longer, more costly, program. But
short-term studies, which typically examine behavior patterns of DARE
"graduates" three to seven years after they complete the program, indicate
that the number of these students who go on to experiment with drugs is
comparable to the number of non- DARE students who do so.

Poor Success Rate

David Springer, a researcher with the University of Texas' School of Social
Work who has published several papers on drug treatment strategies, says
that DARE's phenomenal popularity belies its less-than-inspiring success
rate. If the goal of school districts is keeping kids off drugs, he says,
"Why would you spend that much money on a program that's about as effective
as the flip of a coin? The only reason it hasn't been cut despite the
research is because, politically, it's very popular."

Indeed, DARE's greatest success appears to be as a public relations
campaign. On a national level, DARE gives politicians an easy way to
demonstrate that they are serious about getting tough on drugs; locally,
police departments see DARE as visible community outreach, a tangible sign
that they are not just policing the community, but helping to improve it.
Additionally, DARE makes officers more accessible and less intimidating to
children who may be at risk for drug use or gang influence, says Assistant
A.P.D. Chief Mills. "There's great interaction between the officers and
students," he says. "It's an excellent example of officers forming
relationships with kids."

As trusted confidantes, however, DARE officers must operate in two
conflicting worlds. As teachers, they must serve as approachable role
models to whom students can confide about drug- and gang-related problems;
but as police officers, they can never forget that their foremost duty is
to enforce the law. The result of these conflicting aims, critics say, is a
confusing and unrealistic "no-use" policy which, a Department of Justice
study has found, students overwhelmingly reject.

"Zero tolerance is one of the worst campaigns we've tried to pull off in
the war on drugs," says UT's Springer. "As a nation, maybe we need to move
toward a harm-reduction approach
because kids are going to continue to
experiment." But DARE, whose curriculum has been widely criticized for
blurring distinctions between "hard" and "soft" drugs and exaggerating the
effects of marijuana and alcohol, recognizes no such possibility. Its
curriculum equates drug use with drug abuse in the second lesson, telling
students flatly that "no use of any substance is acceptable."

Although the jury is out on whether such tactics make students less likely
to confide in police, many teachers feel that the job of educating kids
ought to fall to parents and educators, not armed law enforcement
officials. Lance Miles, a former fifth-grade teacher whose students took
DARE classes weekly, says that although the DARE officers he dealt with
genuinely tried to relate to the kids in his classes, they varied widely in
their teaching ability. While the officers did bring up issues -- such as
alcoholism and family drug abuse -- which are not addressed by the
district's health book, Miles wonders if any program can substitute for
positive parental influence. "A lot of parents aren't doing their jobs, and
we're left to do that job [at school], telling them things they ought to be
taught about at home.
There's only so much" that teachers and police
officers can do before parents must take over, Miles says.

But don't expect AISD [Austin Independent School District] to hand drug
education over to parents any time soon. Currently, according to district
spokeswoman Nicole Wright, the district is considering a number of
alternative programs, including a five-week pilot called "Project Yes,"
targeted at fourth- and sixth-grade classes. In the meantime, school
counselors and health classes are filling in the gaps in AISD's drug
education program.

With Austin kicking the DARE habit, will other area school districts follow
suit? Unlikely, say both DARE representatives and officials with the Travis
County Sheriff's Department, which administers DARE to districts outside
Austin's city limits. Sgt. Wayne Singleton, of the department's Community
Services division, says he sees no reason to abandon the program, which has
received a "pretty positive" response from the community. DARE leader
Parsons characterizes the situation in Austin as "man bites dog," an
aberration in a nation moving closer, if anything, toward universal
adoption of DARE. But with drug use on the rise across America, and DARE
under increasing scrutiny by school districts looking for more than an
expensive PR campaign, it's almost certain that more districts will take a
long look at DARE and choose to "just say no."

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)