SCHOOLS TAKE AIM AT DRUGS

As drugs and their corresponding social ills reach deeper into schools, educators play a key role in a community's battle against substance abuse.

Bill Askew, a crisis prevention counselor, is coordinator of the drug-free school program in the Cape Girardeau School District. Askew said the district has taken on drug education with a variety of programs that start as early as first grade.

"In the first grade we have as part of the regular curriculum a peer educating program where high school kids come in and follow a self-esteem building curriculum in the first, third and fifth grades," he said.

Project Charlie (Chemical Abuse Resolution Lies In Education) is a program instituted in 1985 for second- and fourth-grade students in Cape Girardeau.

In the sixth grade there's DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education); QUEST is used in seventh grade.

In each grade students are learning self-esteem and refusal skills that Askew and others hope will last a lifetime.

Many of the programs aimed at young children build social skills, including the ability to make and care for friends. The programs emphasize development of a sense of right and wrong and responsibility in decision-making.

Askew said that when children lag in social skills they're unable to make friends and often become alienated. Those children then are attracted to the accepting and non-judgmental subculture of drug abusers.

Although educators and parents claim the drug curriculum is effective, there are some students who at a very young age show signs that they are at risk of becoming drug abusers.

A program started this year at May Greene School is aimed at such children: In an upstairs classroom, representatives of three agencies work together to help children stay in school and out of trouble.

Cape Girardeau's Caring Communities project, funded by a state grant, is one of just five sites in Missouri experimenting with this type of cooperation.

Jo Boyer is coordinator of the project and works with Marie Walker, a social services worker with the Division of Family Services, and Michael Harris, a case manager with the Community Counseling Center.

"We are here to work with the families," Boyer said. "Drugs do show up a lot in some of these problems, and we work closely with the drug-free schools program that Mr. Askew is with."

Boyer said the Caring Communities project has three goals: to keep children in school; to keep them, if possible, in their own homes; and to keep them out of the juvenile justice system.

"Our ultimate goal is to do preventative things to meet these three goals," she said. "Unfortunately, we find that we are having to do some intervention because some of these things may be occurring already."

Boyer said school is one of the best places to detect children who might be at risk for drug abuse.

"Teachers see the children every day, and the kids bring the problem to school with them," she said. "The problem is, teacher's aren't really equipped to do anything about it. That's where we can help.

In addition to the agencies working directly from the school, other agencies and organizations are in on the project, Boyer said.

Programs with the Retired Senior Volunteers Program (RSVP), the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and the juvenile office's new Minority Youth Services Project all have joined the effort.

"We're trying to introduce activities to keep the children busy and to take that time away that they might spend on the street," Boyer said. "We hope that by providing outlets that these children will not go in that negative direction."

As students enter junior high and high school, drug education is included in the regular health curriculum. But here is where some of the actual drug abuse begins to surface. Askew said there are recovery groups in the junior high and high schools that typically serve up to a dozen students each year who have a substance abuse problem.

To foster drug resistance, an abundance of activities are held throughout the school year by the many drug prevention student groups.

Askew said it's very difficult to assess whether all the attention is working, and whether fewer students today are using drugs than in the past.

"The programs in the district have only been around for five to six years at the elementary age," he said. "So the students haven't reached high school to see what kind of impact the programs have had."

But he said he thinks students are more willing to resist the pressure from peers to experiment with drugs.

"A lot more students are becoming vocal about not accepting that type of behavior from their peers," he said. "But it's a concern, and we're trying to make sure all the kids are given everything they need to prevent substance abuse from taking place."