DRUGS: PROGRAM AIMS AT EDUCATION OF YOUNGSTERS

It's Tuesday afternoon at Washington School, and Janet Shepard addresses a rapt audience in Kathy Miller's second grade class.

The 7 and 8-year-old students have just watched a videotape adaption of Dr. Seuss' book, "Sneetches," which delivers a message about discrimination and bigotry among "star-bellied" and "plain-bellied Sneetches."

Now Shepard is reading the Stephen Cosgrove story of "Creole," an imaginary swamp critter that suffers rejection because of its enormous size.

It's all part of the curriculum for Project Charlie (Chemical Abuse Resolution Lies In Education), a program instituted in 1985 for second and fourth grade students in Cape Girardeau.

With drugs now reaching deeper into the schools, educators and parents hope to quell the problem by teaching self-esteem and refusal skills at an early age.

"Part of me says, `Why do we have to start so young,'" Shepard admitted in an interview after the class. "But at second grade, this is the age when you can pour in the information and they don't question it."

Donna Boardman, assistant coordinator of Cape Girardeau's community traffic safety program, is one of Project Charlie's local founders.

She said one of the reasons she helped bring Project Charlie to Cape Girardeau is that she felt other drug-prevention programs were started too late in school.

"I'm pretty firmly convinced that you have to give the kids some of this information as early as possible," Boardman said. "You don't have to overwhelm them, but you want to give them some basic social skills.

"A lot of them are simply positive parenting skills. It would be nice to think they were getting that at home, but too often that's not the case."

The program's curriculum is divided into four units, with the last, and smallest unit, dealing specifically with drug education.

"Even though the program's aimed at drug abuse prevention, we only spend three to four weeks with drug information," said Shepard. "It's the last thing we do, and by the time we get to that section, most of the kids have already learned a lot in their health unit.

"What we do is reinforce what they've already learned and concentrate on refusal skills."

Specifically, Project Charlie focuses on four primary objectives. They include:

Build each student's self-esteem so that each feels cared for, supported and important.

Enhance social skills, including the ability to make and care for friends and teach assertiveness and resistance skills.

Emphasize development of positive values and a sense of right and wrong, along with a sense of personal responsibility in decision-making and with regard to the welfare of others.

Offer prevention education in the areas of drug and alcohol abuse.

Boardman said Project Charlie's spends a good deal of time developing social skills.

"We work on understanding the value of friends how to go about making friends and the idea of peer relations, which can be positive or negative," she said. "We do a lot of work with relationships, to try to get the kids to see the value in developing them."

What does the ability to make a friend have to do with drug abuse prevention?

Boardman explained: "Often when a kid doesn't have good social skills, they're unable to make friends and find themselves alienated. They don't fit in.

"Those kids are the easiest to fall into the group that's using drugs, because they don't care about your social skills. They just accept you."

Boardman also said it's important for children to learn the difference between making a decision based on "wants and likes" and one based on virtue.

"We focus heavily on their need to develop the ability to make a decision based on what's right and wrong, and not necessarily what their friends think is right and wrong or on their likes or dislikes," she said.

Along with those decisions, Boardman added, are responsibilities. She said Project Charlie teaches students they must be willing to accept responsibility for their choices.

"Those same social skills then help them with a variety of other problems they'll face, such as teen pregnancy, AIDS, and teen suicide," she said.

Boardman said the whole idea of Project Charlie, and other drug prevention programs, is to delay experimentation with drugs until students at least are old enough to realize all the potential pitfalls of drug abuse.

Of course, it's difficult to compile empirical data on whether Project Charlie actually works, and Boardman and Shepard rely mostly on their own intuition and "gut feelings" when they say the program is a success.

Providing children with skills they'll need to be responsible adults certainly can't hurt, Boardman added. She said a strong family is the key ingredient that most likely will assure a child's successful sally through childhood and adolescence.

Unfortunately, too often today's children come from broken homes, and many parents have little time and energy to devote to drug prevention education and development of their children's social skills.

"I would like to say that by giving these skills to students, we can achieve all that needs to be done as far as drug prevention," Boardman said. "But 30 minutes in the classroom once a week won't replace the parent's activity all week.

"Unfortunately for some of these kids, this is the only helpful contact they have with an adult."

Although limited, it's through that contact that Boardman hopes Project Charlie can make a difference.

On Tuesday afternoon, the students in Mrs. Miller's class seem to be getting the message.

After watching the story of the "Sneetches" and hearing about "Creole," Shepard queries the students about what they've learned.

Across the room, hands bolt skyward. "Never judge somebody by the way they look," said Nicole Ramsey.

Greg Criddle added, "Just because people don't have belly stars doesn't mean you're better than them."

Tyler Howard remembered the way Creole was befriended by a baby alligator that also suffered rejection because he stuttered.

"If someone stutters, you shouldn't make fun of them, just because you can't understand them," he said. "And don't leave them out."