Community Education
- Community Education
Deputy David C. Litteral
THE NEW D.A.R.E.
PROGRAM
The Greene County Sheriff’s Office has chosen the D.A.R.E.
program to help you teach your children how to recognize and resist
the direct and subtle pressures that influence them to experiment with
alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other drugs. Since between 70% and
90% of all crime is drug related, it is absolutely vital that we work
together to reach the children of our community before it is too late.
The D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program is usually
introduced to children in the 5th or 6th grade. The Sheriff’s Office
has a specially trained Deputy who comes into area schools one day a
week for 10 weeks and teaches the students. The D.A.R.E. curriculum is
designed so that it integrates easily into other lessons. Student
participation in the D.A.R.E. program is incorporated as an integral
part of the school's curriculum in health, science, social studies,
language arts, or other subjects. The curriculum is dependent on the
classroom teacher to maintain a supportive role in classroom
management while the officer is teaching. The Sheriff’s Office
appreciates all of the assistance that the area schools have given
with regards to the D.A.R.E. program.
Part of the reason D.A.R.E. works so well is because it is a
collaborative effort between your Sheriff’s Office, your school, the
parents, and community leaders. D.A.R.E. works because it surrounds
children with support and encouragement from all sides. A study of the
effectiveness of the D.A.R.E. program finds that an enhanced version
appears to be more effective.
A study by the University of Minnesota shows that the NEW
D.A.R.E., which involves teachers and students, is meeting with
success.
For the study, researchers compared the D.A.R.E. and NEW
D.A.R.E. programs given to 6,237 7th-graders in 24 schools in 1999 and
2000. One third of the schools used the original D.A.R.E. curriculum,
one third used the enhanced NEW D.A.R.E., and the remaining
schools used no drug-prevention programs.
With the NEW D.A.R.E. program, researchers found that boys were
less likely than those who received no training to show increases in
alcohol and other drug use.
In addition, girls in the NEW D.A.R.E. program were less likely
to report ever being drunk compared to girls who took part in the
original D.A.R.E. program.
"In summary, the NEW D.A.R.E. Project demonstrated that a
multi-component intervention significantly improved the D.A.R.E.
middle- and junior-high school D.A.R.E. curriculum and became an
effective intervention for reducing increases in alcohol, tobacco, and
multi-grid use and victimization among adolescent boys," the
study said.
With that being said the Greene County Sheriff’s Office will be
moving forward with NEW D.A.R.E. so as to ensure the programs
future success.
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