Last December, WashingtonCountyInsider.com was first to report on school administrators in the community receiving letters from the Washington County Sheriff’s Department about the suspension of the D.A.R.E. program.
Sheriff Dale Schmidt notified 11 elementary school principals saying the program would end in the 2016 Spring semester primarily because of staffing.
There’s was quite a push back from the community, especially since the number of heroin cases appear to be on the rise. Today, Elevate, a community-based resource center that focuses on drug and alcohol prevention stepped up with a creative solution to try and bring back D.A.R.E.Elevate executive director Mary Simon wrote, “Our community prevention educators are ready and equipped to teach Too Good For Drugs, a research-based, age-specific Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse prevention curriculum, to students in all grade schools impacted by this decision.”
From all that I have read, D.A.R.E. is not an effective program. Having seen taught in elementary schools, it’s kind of harmless, though it can cause some kids to turn in loved ones or misinterpret what is being said.
Actually, the DARE program as taught from 1983 to 2009 appeared to have negative results in that some studies showed increase use of drugs and alcohol among certain groups of DARE graduates. Those studies are the reason I kept my son out of DARE. It always irritated me that DARE was pushed so hard by schools and police, given that there were other programs that had evidence showing positive results.
Since 2010 DARE has switched to a new program that was designed by behavioral specialists instead of police and teachers. Preliminary studies on the new program seem to show that it works much better. We will have to see what the evidence shows.