RETURN OF D.A.R.E. TO CITY SCHOOLS POSTPONED

In a back and forth Marietta City Council meeting Thursday night City
Council members decided more discussion is needed on a proposal to
keep the DARE program in city schools this year.

After much discussion and a five-minute recess at the meeting, council
members voted 6 to 1 to send the proposal back to the police and fire
committee which meets at 4 p.m. March 10.

Councilman Sam Gwinn, chair of the police and fire committee, was the
lone council member who voted to approve the proposal as is.

At issue is the Marietta Police Department's manpower shortage and the
agreement to transport mental patients for the Washington County
Sheriff's Office in exchange for the sheriff's office sending its DARE
officer into Marietta city schools. The city police had suspended the
DARE program in city schools because of a lack of officers to carry
out the program. If the agreement with the sheriff's office had been
approved Thursday, this exchange of services would have begun Monday
and extended to May 23.

City Council members who raised questions about the proposal
proclaimed their support for the DARE program, but said they needed
more time to digest the proposal. DARE, or Drug Abuse Resistance
Education, is a police officer-led series of classroom lessons that
teaches children from kindergarten through 12th grade how to resist
peer pressure and live productive drug- and violence-free lives.

"I want this thing to go," said Councilman Tom Vukovic. "I keep trying
to come up with a reasonable answer to get this to go."

Vukovic said he had questions about whether the city could transfer
the $6,304 it had set aside to fund the DARE program to the sheriff's
office instead of picking up the transportation of mental patients for
that department.

Councilman Mike McCauley also thought there were issues left to
address.

"If we don't have the manpower to do the DARE program, why do we have
the manpower to do the transports for the sheriff's department,"
McCauley said. "It needs more consideration and time."

Marietta Mayor Michael Mullen said while he understands council's need
for more discussion, he thought the agreement made sense. In his
estimation, the county DARE officer would have spent 40 hours a week
in local schools for about 11 weeks, while the city would have
provided transportation to Athens and Cambridge only once every two
weeks.

"I thought it'd be a good investment on our part," Mullen said.