DARE PROGRAM: SACRED COW OR FATTED CALF?

HAMPTON BAYS--"Are you ready to rock?" Police Officer Theresa Tedesco
shouted into the microphone. In thunderous unison, 300 sixth graders at
Hampton Bays Elementary School shouted back, "Yes!"

Parents and some grandparents packed the bleachers and lined up along the
walls for the Jan. 23 ceremony put on for graduates of DARE, the Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program. The students turned cartwheels, performed a
rap song and took turns reciting lines in skits they wrote themselves. The
first-place finishers in an essay contest each read their winning submissions.

The essays, like the hand-drawn posters hung on the gym walls, offered
variations on a single theme: that tobacco, illegal drugs and violence are
dangerous. It's the central message that thousands of students across
Suffolk are taught each year in the DARE program.

Suffolk is not alone. The DARE America curriculum, developed two decades
ago by members of the Los Angeles Police Department, has been adopted by 80
percent of all schools nationwide. It puts uniformed officers in elementary
and middle-school classrooms to teach about the dangers of tobacco,
alcohol, controlled or illegal drugs and violence. The officers also
propose ways to help students resist the temptation to experiment or to act
out aggressions, and they provide warnings about the consequences if they
don't.

But there's a catch: numerous studies across the country, including one in
Suffolk two years ago, cast doubt on DARE's effectiveness. Its graduates
are no less likely to use drugs than other children, the studies have
concluded.

Nevertheless, the program remains enormously popular. So popular, in fact,
that any suggestion that it be replaced with a more effective or less
expensive program tends to raise howls of protest from parents, school
officials and the police.

As a result, Suffolk lawmakers girding to do battle with a projected $250
million budget shortfall in 2005 are reluctant to take any overt jab at
DARE, even though it costs the police department nearly $3 million a year.

"We suspect that there are gaping holes in the program and that it may not
be cost-effective, but legislators are politicians," said one Suffolk
legislator, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used. "No one's
going to risk their political future by doing anything other than standing
up with the parents. Parents vote."

Other legislators said that asking school districts to help bear the cost
of DARE has never been more than talk. "The schools are up against a rock
and a hard place already," said Joseph Caracappa, the Legislature's
presiding officer. "And it would just shift the tax burden from one
district to another."

Steve Levy, the new county executive, was elected on a reform platform that
called for a soup-to-nuts evaluation of all county spending and promised
aggressive change wherever he found waste and inefficiency. Although the
police department's budget is squarely in his crosshairs, Mr. Levy declined
last week to say that DARE was.

What Mr. Levy would say was that within a month his staff would begin
looking at ways to use DARE officers for other police work during school
vacations.

He also said that the new police commissioner, Richard Dormer, would help
evaluate DARE itself for possible improvements and that civilian teachers
might be used in parts of the program. "We're believers in the concept, but
we have to find the best implementation," Mr. Levy said. "It will likely
stay in place through the rest of this school year as it is. If there are
changes, they'll take place in September."

In an echo of a recommendation made two years ago by a countywide study, he
said those changes could include moving some DARE officers out of
elementary schools and into high schools. The program might also be
extended to both the lower and higher grades. "We may have to experiment to
find the best age bracket," he said.

Most Suffolk schools customize DARE America's curriculums and pick and
choose which grades to use them in. Some, like Hampton Bays, use the
program only in one grade, typically the fifth or sixth.

Dr. Lee Koppelman, the executive director of the Long Island Regional
Planning Board, said the board's 2001 study looked at schools across
Suffolk and at the incidence of drug abuse among DARE graduates. It
concluded, as studies elsewhere have, that the program was ineffective in
the long term.

"You can't have a 10-week session in sixth grade and expect it to have
enduring, lifelong qualities," Dr. Koppelman said. "We found it was
generally effective while the students were in the program, but in terms of
lasting impact, it didn't measure up. If I had my druthers, it would be
taught from fifth through 12th grade. That would be a real opportunity to
address addictive behavior."

Asked what became of his study, he replied, "Nothing."

Mr. Dormer, the new police commissioner, was noncommittal about DARE,
saying only that he planned to evaluate the program with one eye on the
2005 budget.

DARE America has countered criticisms by revamping its curriculum for
middle-school students, compacting what was a 17-week course into 10 weeks
and trying to make it more realistic, said Sgt. Enrico Annichiarico, the
head of the Suffolk Police Department's DARE office. He supervises 28
officers, 6 of them with teaching degrees, who work in about 180 schools.

Sergeant Annichiarico said the new curriculum placed emphasis on the
seventh and ninth grades, which he called a sign that DARE America was
"keeping up with the times" and was responding to criticism about not
addressing the needs of older students who are more at risk.

Bemoaning the lack of any frank public discussion of DARE's shortcomings,
Dr. Koppelman said its widespread popularity was "part of the problem."

School administrators like DARE because it allows them to send out an
anti-drug message at no cost to their districts. Police departments pay
most of the costs, and the local P.T.A. typically covers the incidentals,
like the DARE T-shirts given to every graduate and for pizza for the
graduation party.

"It really is a good deal for the district," said Marc Meyer, the acting
principal of Hampton Bays Elementary School. Mr. Meyer, like officials in
other districts, said he had heard about but had not read studies critical
of DARE. "I have to admit that my view is skewed because I love the
program," he said.

Other school officials said they had never studied its effectiveness and
had no intention to do so. "We've never discussed that," said George
Leeman, the Hampton Bays school board president. "We've always supported
its continuation."

Parents say they like DARE because they believe their children's enthusiasm
is a sign that they are getting the "Just Say No and Mean It" message.

Dorothy and John Capuano, whose daughter Amanda, 11, graduated from the
Hampton Bays DARE program on Jan. 23, said that the program helped students
resist peer pressure, encouraging them to think about the possible
consequences of drug and alcohol use and to choose positive alternatives,
like sports.

"It puts in the kids' faces what can happen if they make bad choices," Mrs.
Capuano said. "Some parents don't know how to do that."

Her husband said: "We both quit smoking 10 years ago, and we talk to our
kids about the mistakes we made. But I also tell them that, because we
didn't have DARE when I was a kid, we didn't know that we had choices."

They conceded their daughter was probably too young to experience real
temptation. "But it's a good influence," Mr. Capuano said. "It's another
opportunity for her to make a good decision."

Besides, his wife added, "The kids think it's cool to be in DARE."

Police officials are equally enthusiastic about DARE. "Putting a uniformed
officer into the school helps build relationships with the kids, with the
community," said David Hegermiller, the chief of the Riverhead Town Police
Department. "Police departments certainly do get a lot of public relations
mileage out of that."

Although he was aware of the criticism of DARE, he and other police
officials called the program the one "proactive thing" that departments can
do to fight violence and drug and alcohol use. Everything else, they said,
amounts to reactive mopping up after the damage has been done.

"The parents go crazy if anyone talks about stopping it," Chief Hegermiller
said. "They like the contact between the officer and the kids, too, but
when I talk about putting officers in the schools in some other capacity,
they start screaming. It doesn't make sense to me because I see them as the
same thing."

But Dr. Koppelman said he found that DARE's message and its widespread
popularity provide little more than a false sense of security and an
unearned opportunity for parents, the police and educators to be
self-congratulatory.

"The kids like it because they get recognition and having a police officer
in the classroom is a novel thing," he said. "And parents whose kids don't
have drug problems to begin with think that DARE is responsible. But the
real serious problem is that behind all the fun and recognition and hoopla
is a valid concept that hasn't been allowed to work because it isn't
pounded into these children throughout the educational process. Like
anything else, it wears off."