VA. SCHOOLS CHANGE COURSE IN ANTI-DRUG EDUCATION

Loudoun County and the cities of Falls Church and Manassas Park are the
only jurisdictions in Northern Virginia that still offer the DARE program,
after the Prince William County Police Department replaced the national
initiative to dissuade students from using drugs and alcohol with its own
curriculum.

County police found that DARE, which stands for Drug and Alcohol Resistance
Education, has an inflexible curriculum and no longer works with Prince
William's changing demographics, said County Executive Craig S. Gerhart.

What worked in 1987, when the county adopted the DARE program, does not fit
with the proliferation of gangs and Internet crimes in recent years, he said.

Other communities across the region and country also have shelved DARE,
which was deemed ineffective in a 2003 report by the General Accounting
Office. The federal agency found that substance abuse did not differ
between students who were exposed to DARE in the fifth or sixth grades and
those who were not.

In Prince William, teachers seemed put off by DARE's restrictive 10-week
program, which targets fifth-graders, Gerhart said. Just a little more than
half of the county's elementary schools were participating, he said.

Although DARE America, the national nonprofit organization, has created a
new curriculum, the Prince William Police Department decided to go with its
new program, Basic Elementary Addiction, Wellness & Abuse Resource
Education (BE AWARE).

The BE AWARE curriculum will begin this school year; 26 police officers
already trained to teach students DARE will take the program into schools.

The curriculum -- which includes gang awareness, Internet safety, conflict
management, bullying prevention, stealing and drug and alcohol abstinence
- -- will be taught in kindergarten to fifth grade.

Gerhart said the program will not be limited to 10-week instruction as DARE
is. "It's designed to be much more flexible," he said. "This is a 10-module
program."

Police officers, principals and teachers will be able to tailor the program
to individual schools that deal with different issues based on the
community, according to a report by Deane.

"During the 2004-2005 year, the demographics of one elementary school was
63 percent Hispanic. The needs of this school are drastically different
than those of another elementary school with different demographics," Deane
wrote in his report.

Senior Trooper Gene Ayers of the Virginia State Police, the state DARE
coordinator, said he was disappointed to lose another Northern Virginia
participant. "Several jurisdictions in Northern Virginia have pulled out,"
he said.

Across Virginia, DARE is taught in 105 out of 134 school districts, Ayers said.

"DARE is still the most widely used prevention program in the world," he
said. "I'm still convinced it's the best prevention program in the market."

Ayers said the GAO report was unfair because it was based on surveys from 1994.