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Substance
Abuse and Violence Prevention
Inside
the 21 st Century School House
The Drug Abuse Resistance
Education (D.A.R.E.) program, the pioneer prevention effort founded
in Los Angeles in 1983, is going high-tech, interactive, and decision-model-based.
Gleaming with the latest in prevention science and teaching techniques,
D.A.R.E. is reinventing itself as part of a major national research
study that promises to help teachers and administrators cope with
ever-evolving federal prevention program requirements and the thorny
issues of school violence, budget cuts, and terrorism.
Gone is the old-style
approach to prevention in which an officer stands behind a podium
and lectures students in straight rows. New D.A.R.E. officers are
trained as "coaches" to support kids who are using research-based
refusal strategies in high-stakes peer-pressure environments. New
D.A.R.E. students of 2004 are getting to see for themselves -- via
stunning brain imagery -- tangible proof of how substances diminish
mental activity, emotions, coordination and movement. Mock courtroom
exercises are bringing home the social and legal consequences of
drug use and violence.
Charlie Parsons
D.A.R.E. America President and Chief Executive Officer
"New
D.A.R.E. is setting the gold standard for the future," says Charlie
Parsons, President and Chief Executive Director of D.A.R.E. America, "Prevention inside
the 21 st century school house will need to be effective, diverse,
accountable, and mean more things to more people, particularly with
the safety issues that have emerged since Columbine and terrorist
alerts. That's one reason why every New D.A.R.E. officer is also
being trained as a certified School Resource Officer (SRO)."
Click
here for evaluations of the "new" D.A.R.E. program
The New D.A.R.E.
curriculum is in its fourth year of a massive five-year national
research effort funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Under the direction of principal investigator, Dr. Zili Sloboda,
the University of Akron's Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention
Study is a rigorous scientific evaluation of the New D.A.R.E. curricula
designed to blend the latest in effective prevention science with
the nation's largest prevention delivery network-D.A.R.E.
Dr.
Zili Sloboda
Dr.
Herb Kleber, internationally recognized substance abuse expert and
Chairman of D.A.R.E. America's Scientific Advisory Board, praises
the ambitious scope of the New D.A.R.E. curriculum study, "D.A.R.E
has had the highest dissemination for decades of any school-based
drug prevention program. It reaches 26 million children a year in
75 percent of all school districts and is admired by children and
parents alike," says Kleber, "The generous support of the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation and the talent of the University of Akron
group have made it possible to combine this acceptance with state-of-the-art-
teaching and content to make D.A.R.E. not only the most popular,
but the best."
With
research showing that adolescents, in particular, need to be involved
in the learning process, experts shifted the focus in the new D.A.R.E.
curriculum to include officer-facilitated work, discussion groups,
and role-playing sessions. "The resulting 'group dynamic' of New
D.A.R.E. encourages kids to work together on assignments and think
for themselves," says Dr. Sloboda, "New D.A.R.E. is about giving
kids the skills and information they need to make good life choices."
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