DARE ANTI-DRUG PROGRAM ON THE SKIDS

Western Montana Counties Find Other Funding Priorities

POLSON - The 20th anniversary of DARE - Drug Abuse Resistance
Education - was celebrated nationwide last month.

In Kalispell, 300 excited fifth-graders graduated en masse at the
Flathead County Fairgrounds in a ceremony featuring former National
Football League cornerback Kerry Justin as a speaker and celebrity
cheerleader.

But elsewhere in western Montana, DARE has gone dark.

Founded by Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates in 1983 and organized
as the nonprofit corporation DARE America in 1987, DARE still exists
in about three-quarters of the nation's school districts, according to
DARE's estimates. (Some dispute this number.) In the typical program,
a specially trained police officer teaches fifth-graders how to resist
peer pressure and say "no" to substance abuse.

But DARE barely has a presence in western Montana anymore.

Of the 74 school districts west of the Continental Divide, only the
DARE program in Kalispell is still functioning.

DARE participation in the region is down about 20 percent from five
years ago, according to the state coordinator, Jeff Douglass, a
Montana Law Enforcement Academy instructor in Helena.

Lake, Sanders and Butte-Silver Bow counties, as well as the Missoula
Police Department, all sponsored DARE officers in the schools in the
late 1990s, but no more.

DARE is doing better east of the Continental Divide in both rural and
urban school districts, Douglass said.

"There's still a lot of good DARE sites," he said. "Billings,
Kalispell, Helena, Great Falls, Shelby still have it. Many smaller
agencies are still doing it - the sheriff in Jordan, for example.
There's DARE in Dillon. We've got about 80 officers that are still
DARE certified."

DARE was once the poster program for the nation's war on drugs. Its
decline in Montana is symptomatic of interests turned elsewhere - a
war on terrorism, for example, and an increase in demand for core
academic performance in the schools.

In fact, DARE has also failed to live up to its promise in one
significant respect - metrics. DARE has lost funding because of the
demand for measurable accountability by the federal government, which
supplied most of DARE's money in its glory years.

Also, school districts are reluctant to pay for the program, which
while educational is not a core academic program and takes time away
from the skills the federal government insists are vital, according to
testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.

Some local police agencies also found DARE's approach too restrictive.
And in recent years, school resource officer grants have put cops into
schools as community police officers, decreasing one of the
significant attractions of DARE curricula 20 years ago.

"A lot of it was the schools decided they didn't need it anymore,"
said Sanders County Sheriff Gene Arnold of Thompson Falls. Sanders
County dropped DARE in the late 1990s because federal grant funding
was no longer available and school districts did not pick up the tab,
he said.

The Missoula Police Department still has cops in schools, but it has
"moved beyond" DARE, according to Marty Ludemann, uniform patrol
captain of the department.

He said DARE insists on a "copyrighted" lesson plan "and you can't
deviate from it."

"Actually, we've moved past DARE and created a much more
community-based resource," he said.

Another problem has been accountability - does DARE do what it sets
out to do by reducing substance abuse later on, as the fifth-graders
grow up?

In the most influential review to date of scientific research, the
General Accounting Office - the accountability arm of Congress -
concluded it does not. In a January 2003 report, the GAO said:
"Evaluations of the DARE Elementary School curriculum show no
significant differences in drug use between DARE and non-DARE students."

But that was old news to some funding sources. The Department of
Education decided in 1999 that only programs that had some valid
scientific evidence of effectiveness for their stated goals would be
eligible for the DOE's $635 million drug prevention budget, and DARE
did not qualify. (The program still received substantial funding in
fiscal year 2000 from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice
Assistance, which provided about $2 million for DARE regional training
centers to support the training of new police officers who teach DARE
program lessons.) As the federal funding slumped, so did DARE.

In Lake County, for example, Sheriff Bill Barron decided to cut DARE
shortly after he took office in 1999.

"When I took over, there was a budget crisis and I had to cut a
deputy," he said. The deputy on the DARE program was reassigned to
patrol duty. "It's really good public relations, but I doubt its
effectiveness as a drug program," said Barron.

He said school resource officers who are also paid through a federal
grant in Lake County, work with older students - not fifth-graders,
but they still build rapport with schoolchildren - and also do crime
prevention and law enforcement work. "These officers build rapport,
but on a different level," he said.

And DARE, in response to criticism, has modified its program,
recommending an extension or, in some cases, implementation in the
seventh grade followed by classroom sessions in subsequent years. This
modification of the program has yet to be evaluated.

It appears no program in Montana has yet instituted this expanded DARE
curriculum effort, and it has been slow in coming nationwide.

"Trying to get communities to implement beyond the elementary school
program has been problematic," said DARE America senior deputy
director and regional director Frank Pegueros of Los Angeles.

Still, the DARE program has a great reservoir of public support in
many communities where it no longer exists. "It was absolutely 100
percent wonderful. I wish we had it today," said Lake County's former
DARE officer, Sheriff's Deputy Lucky Larson.

And in Kalispell, DARE remains a focus of the Kalispell Police
Department, which dedicates one officer to DARE full time for five
months each year, expending more than $20,000. The program is also
supported by substantial community donations.

"I haven't found the silver bullet for drug resistance education,"
said Kalispell Police Chief Frank Garner. "But this is an important
piece of it. We see it as a crime-prevention strategy. It teaches good
life skills and helps develop good relationships. It's not just about
kids making good decisions about substance abuse."