DARE GETS IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO STUDENTS

A study in Kentucky that found the DARE program has little effect on whether children use drugs, alcohol or tobacco turned up some surprisingly questionable results.

The study, which tracked more than 1,000 DARE students in Fayette County, Ky., over a 10-year period, found some initial improvements in the students' attitudes about drug use but few long-term effects in attitudes or decision making.

There are far too many variables when it comes to drug, alcohol and tobacco use to try to draw any conclusions from the University of Kentucky at Louisville study.

The DARE program is the nation's largest anti-drug abuse program. The 17-week program is taught to fifth- or sixth-graders in the classroom by uniformed police officers who provides information about alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. They also provide strategies to help students resist peer pressure to use or abuse drugs.

Approximately 80 percent of school districts in the nation have DARE programs. The classes are paid for by DARE America with private and corporate donations, but the salaries of the police officers leading the classes are at public expense.

DARE, coupled with other drug-education programs, has been successful at a number of area schools, including Jackson schools. Sam Duncan, drug-free coordinator for Jackson schools, said he believes DARE does make a difference in the lives of students.

Duncan didn't put much stock in the University of Kentucky study, the latest in a list of studies that has questioned the success of DARE. Duncan, who has run the program for sixth-graders for five years, pointed out that students may not act upon everything they are taught, but later in life they remember and use those things that were learned in their younger years. That applies not only to such course work as geography, history and science -- to name a few -- but to what they learn about drugs as well.

To conclude that DARE doesn't have a lasting effect on students based on a study of just 1,000 students in one Kentucky county, while millions of students around the country take the DARE course, would be absurd. Follow-up studies of DARE students in a rural county compared to those in an inner-city environment would be drastically different. A fair sampling wasn't taken.

While study after study attacks the DARE program, they miss the point: Without DARE there would be no drug education in many school districts. The combination of DARE in the schools and parents talking to their children about drugs is hard to beat regardless of what the studies say.