DECATUR POLICE CHIEF ADVOCATES LOCAL PROGRAM TO REPLACE DARE

DECATUR - Decatur Police Chief Mark Barthelemy is proposing to develop a new
program to attack the twin problems of dropouts and truants in the Decatur
School District.

The program would be offered in lieu of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education
program, which the police department staffs with three officers. Those
officers would continue to act as instructors and coordinators for the new
curriculum, which they also would help write during the coming school year,
Barthelemy said.

If the idea moves forward, DARE would not be offered in this school year, he
said.

The idea for a change was broached at a Project Success board meeting in
April, the chief said. Project Success is focused on increasing parental
involvement in schools and decreasing truancy and the dropout rate, which
peaked at nearly 40 percent in 2001 before declining to an estimated 34.5
percent for 2004.

"I'd been thinking for some time about the DARE program," Barthelemy said.
"I had a question in my mind on how effective it was in accomplishing its
mission of preventing kids from using drugs in their adolescent and teen
years. For every six studies that say DARE is effective, there are six that
say it is not. The jury is still out."

DARE has come under national criticism in recent years as ineffective. The
national DARE program responded to those charges by making it more hands-on
for students, rather than focusing on law enforcement officers lecturing to
students. The new curriculum was introduced in Decatur last fall.

The Decatur Police Department has been involved in DARE since the late 1980s
or early 1990s, Barthelemy said. The program has proved valuable for police
officers to have nonthreatening relationships with students that the
department hoped would carry on as the children got older, he said.

"It also would offer drug-resistance education, which is a valuable
program," he said. "But I was looking at ways to do something bigger and
better."

Truancy and the dropout rate are issues affecting the whole community,
Barthelemy said. Kids get in more trouble and crime increases when they are
not in school, he said.

The new curriculum would focus on several things, Barthelemy said:

n Getting students to remain in school and stressing the perils of not doing
so.

n Teaching respect for other people and for authority.

n Building self-esteem.

n Teaching young people how to listen and to be responsible for what they do
and say.

Barthelemy said his idea is to recruit people from the community to talk to
sixth-grade students about their jobs, how they got where they are and what
it took to achieve their success.

"They could explain their profession and how they use the subjects that are
taught every day in school - math, reading, writing, science," he said. "We
could still provide the principles of DARE and more, but we could not use
the copyrighted materials."

The program would need community approval and support to succeed, Barthelemy
said. But after seven years, it could be evaluated to see if there had been
an impact on the dropout rate and the prevention of truancy, he said.

The police chief discussed his ideas Wednesday with school Superintendent
Elmer McPherson and other school administrators.

Funding is an issue, with the school district currently providing half of
the DARE program funding through grants, Barthelemy said. McPherson asked
him to find out what other communities are doing, he said.

The school board would have to agree to host the new program, with the
earliest possible start being the 2006-07 school year, Barthelemy said.

Neither McPherson nor Assistant Superintendent Brian Hodges was available
Friday to comment on what would have to happen before DARE could be dropped
and a new program embraced.

Barthelemy said parochial schools also participate in DARE, and they may
object to dropping it because their students may not need the same emphasis
and motivation to stay in school that public school students seem to
require.

Dawn Torchia, the school district's community engagement specialist, said it
appears the change could be an administrative decision made by the
superintendent after discussion with other key administrators. She said the
idea is so new, school board members have received no information about it.

"If DARE isn't working, we could look at something else that includes
elements of it," Torchia said. "We need to do what is best for our
students."