HEALEY TAKES MESSAGE TO DARE OFFICIALS

Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey will address more than 100 DARE officials
this morning, two weeks after she declared that the drug prevention program
does not keep children off drugs. Her remarks have angered DARE officials,
who say that the program has undergone a major overhaul. Officials from the
Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, which employs local police officers
to teach about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, have been on the
defensive since early this month, when Healey criticized the program. "We
have known for a long time DARE doesn't work," Healey said as she announced
plans to improve the criminal justice system earlier this month.

Observers and some program officials say Healey was right about the
curriculum, which came under heavy attack in the late 1990s after research
showed it did not keep children off drugs. Healey heads a commission that
used a 1998 National Institute of Justice report that identified DARE as an
ineffective crime-fighting program.

Since the report, DARE has revamped its curriculum and rolled out new
methods of teaching fifth-graders and a more innovative way of teaching
seventh-graders that will be launched nationally in September, program
officials say. "I would like people to wait and be fair and hold on," said
Zili Sloboda, a University of Akron professor and a key researcher on the
new DARE curriculum. "DARE heard the critics and responded."

The revised program, funded by a $13.7 million grant from the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation, will eventually focus on seventh- and ninth-graders,
instead of mostly targeting fifth-graders, because research has shown that
teenagers are most likely to begin using drugs between eighth and 10th
grades. The format calls for police officers to coach students, helping them
try out refusal strategies in role-playing exercises, rather than lecturing
to them. Sloboda said research on the effectiveness of the new curriculum
has been encouraging: Seventh-graders who tried out the program in six
cities were more likely to find drugs socially inappropriate, were better at
refusing drugs, and had more accurate beliefs about whether substance abuse
was normal for teenagers. When Los Angeles police officers launched the DARE
program in 1983, it was heralded as an innovative approach to curbing youth
drug use. Using the slogan "just say no," officers talked directly to
children about the dangers of drugs. The slogan popped up on bumper
stickers, T-shirts, and in many forms of pop culture. More than a decade
later, though, it turned out that many children had not said no.
Criminologists wrote at length about the program's inablity to change
children's behavior. Federal education officials stopped endorsing DARE.
Schools dropped the program in favor of more proven strategies. Acting
Governor Jane Swift cut off state funding in 2002.

For their part, Healey and Governor Mitt Romney now say they are willing to
look at the revised DARE program, said Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's
spokesman. "If they have reformatted it and want to present that to us,
we'll be happy to take a look at it," Fehrnstrom said.

"The lieutenant governor thinks the program has some positive elements," he
said. "It helps create healthy relationships between school children and
police officers, for one thing. But the research has shown that it's not
effective as a standalone program if the goal is to reduce incidence of
crime." DARE officials in Massachusetts say they would welcome state
funding. Of the state's 351 communities, 328 had some DARE curriculum in
place at the end of 2002. But since then, that number has dropped to about
200 communities, said Domenic DiNatale, executive director of the
Massachusetts DARE Officers Association, which is taking part this week in
the Cops and Kids Conference in Sturbridge. When the state cut off funding,
a lot of smaller cities and towns couldn't fund it themselves and dropped
it, DiNatale said. Some towns wanted to keep the program, but budget
pressures forced them to shift DARE officers back to policing. "My hope is
that the administration is going to see that the new curriculum is something
everyone is talking about and that the DARE program will continue to be the
gold standard," he said.

The program will continue in many communities, DiNatale said, even if the
state does not fund it again.

"Are they going to fund it? I can't answer it. It's a numbers thing," he
said. "Parents want it. Police chiefs want it. Teachers want it." Last week
at the St. Joseph School in Medford, dozens of fifth-graders and their
families gathered in the school auditorium for a DARE graduation ceremony.
After someone provided fifth-grader Devin Tringale with a stepstool so he
could reach a microphone, he said: "I have learned many ways to say no. . .
. I am committed to making wise decisions."

DiNatale asked the children, "When people say DARE doesn't work, what do you
say?" Some students mumbled, "It does."

DiNatale said, "Louder!" And the kids, in unison, said, "It does!"