BEDFORD 'DARES' TO ENTER PROGRAM

Junior High Part Of National Test To Examine Plan's Effectiveness

TEMPERANCE - Bedford Junior High School's seventh graders will become lab
rats of sorts early next year as part of a national experiment to try to
improve the effectiveness of the long-running DARE program.

Bedford is the only school in Monroe County participating in the project
sponsored by the University of Akron's Institute for Health and Social
Policy to improve the Drug Awareness and Resistance Education curriculum.

In addition to updating the long-taught anti-drug messages of DARE, the
study will measure the effectiveness over a five year period of teaching
the curriculum in seventh, rather than fifth grade, and of going over the
material again in the ninth grade.

"There's some research out there that says the DARE program is less than
effective, and what this [study] is an attempt to rewrite the DARE
curriculum for older students," Jon White, Bedford's assistant
superintendent of curriculum and student services, said.

"Peer pressure really kicks in around the seventh grade, so it makes more
sense to catch kids when that pressure kicks in than when they're younger,"
Mr. White said.

Bedford was selected randomly out of the Detroit Metropolitan area as one
of 80 high schools and 176 "feeder" middle schools in the country to
participate in the Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention Study,
underwritten by a $13.7 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Half of the participating districts will be given the new curriculum to
try, while the other half will continue to teach the DARE program as they
already have as part of a control group.

Students in all the districts will be surveyed each year from 7th to 12th
grade about their drug and alcohol usage, and the results compared to
determine if the new curriculum is having any measurable effect.

Despite decades worth of trying - the real effectiveness of the DARE
program , which is taught each year across Monroe County by local law
enforcement agencies - may be suspect.

According to a 2000 report from the University of Michigan that measures
drug use among middle and high school students nationally, half have at
least tried an illicit substance by the time they finish high school.

The same report claims that nearly 25 percent of the students surveyed
claim to use marijuana regularly.

"This is really the next generation in school-based substance abuse and
violence prevention programming, coupled with the most effective delivery
system, the DARE program," said Jessica Nickel, a spokeswoman for the
University of Akron's Institute for Health and Social Policy. "We drew from
the most successful prevention programs to design [the new curriculum]."

Mr. White said Bedford has enthusiastically embraced the fifth grade DARE
program "for 15 or 20 years, as long as there's been a DARE program."

The annual DARE graduation, he said, has become an annual social event for
the community. But while the district was happy with the current
curriculum, it was excited about being chosen to try and help improve its
performance.

"The reason we're participating in the study is we want to find out if the
seventh grade is more effective. If this proves to be a better way of
intervening, then we're right there on the cutting edge," Mr. White said.

But there is at least one problem that participating in the pilot program
has posed: with the district's resources concentrating on the seventh grade
class, the fifth grade DARE program will have to be suspended.

"The problem is that the manpower is so short in the sheriff's department,
we have to suspend the fifth grade program in order to be able to man the
seventh grade program. But we felt this study was important enough that we
needed to participate," Mr. White said.