$425,000 ADDED TO DRUG FIGHT

Four elementary schools in Federal Way will have $425,000 to help with
drug prevention and abuse.

The grant from the federal Office of National Drug Control Policy was
awarded to Enterprise, Rainier View, Panther Lake and Sherwood Forest
elementary schools over five years.

Using the federal bucks, the schools plan to create the Wonderwood
Village project. The goals of the project are to reduce the number of
students that leave the elementary schools already using drugs and
alcohol, and to reinforce measures to give students who aren't using
more information and help so they don't start, said David Moore,
co-president of the Enterprise PTA.

It's a two-pronged approach to a problem in a part of Federal Way
where 5.1 percent of eighth-grade students binge on alcohol on a
weekly basis, which is .03 percent higher than the state average,
according to Moore.

Results from the Healthy Youth Survey showed that in the 12 months
prior to the survey, the use of alcohol at school was 2 percent versus
the state average of 7.8 percent.

There are more than 2,700 students in the geographic area the program
will serve.

Moore, a professor at the University of Washington, is associate
director of the institution's Center for the Study and Teaching of
At-Risk Students (C-STAR) that connects K-12 schools and early
childhood education programs with universities, community groups and
businesses to work on improving anti-drug programs. He wrote the grant
along with his wife, Nicole, also co-president of the Enterprise PTA.

Enterprise's counselor, Stacy Traylor, said the grant will give the
schools and community the time to organize programs that are normally
done when there is spare time with few resources.

There are a lot of programs working on prevention at the primary grade
levels, but few work on helping those students using drugs and alcohol
to stop, he said.

The Enterprise PTA looked at its activities and determined it needed
to make some changes, Moore said. There weren't any teachers in the
organization because it wasn't as supportive as it could have been.
After more than a year of change that included some internal turmoil,
Moore said the PTA agreed to work on the health of students and
specifically in regards to drugs and alcohol.

When the parent group approached principal Margot Hightower with their
plan to help, she supported their goal and offered them the use of an
empty portable building, where Wonderwood Village will be
headquartered.

The grant took more than a year to put together. While the dollars
will be held by the PTA, a UW official will have oversight over how
the money is used.

The near future will be spent considering programs in place within the
community and schools. That includes a group studying how to bolster
and bring together prevention programs, while a second group looks at
ways to have intervention programs from the community work in the
school. A third group plans to bring prevention programs to kids up to
7 in the community. Then a plan will be created to bring those
programs together to help students and include assistance from UW
specialists on how to best use the resources at hand.

The model is not untried, Hightower said. Similar projects have been
started in Juneau, Alaska and in Selah in eastern Washington by the
C-STAR program.