Thursday, March 25, 1999
School defended for suspending 6th grade in pot case
BY BERNIE MIXON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
GREENHILLS — A failure by sixth-graders who graduated from Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) to report suspected marijuana at their school has renewed debate about DARE's effectiveness.
Parents and educators applauded a decision by Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic School to suspend the students for one day for not reporting what they may have known.
But those who teach the DARE program say the failure of these students to report suspected drug activity should not be seen as an indictment of the program.
“We don't expect a sixth-grader to know how to handle every situation. We are trying to give them the fundamentals to handle the pressures they may face,” said Springdale police Officer Jeff Witte, who teaches DARE at Springdale and Heritage Hill elementaries.
On Friday, the 30 students must serve out a day of suspension and attend a drug-
awareness meeting with their parents at the school or risk the possibility of an additional four-day suspension.
Instead of reporting to school officials that a student may have had marijuana, two students went home and told their mothers, who then reported the information to the school. The student was then confronted and found to have marijuana, school officials said.
The students were given three opportunities to say they didn't know of the drug being brought to school.
All the sixth-graders were suspended because many, if not all of them, had knowledge about the marijuana possession, said Principal Judy Grubb.
DARE has been promoted as a way to give students the skills they need to avoid drugs, gangs or violence. The program is in about 75 percent of school districts and 44 countries around the world.
A recent study by the U.S. Department of Education found that few school-based drug-prevention programs were comprehensive enough to affect student drug use.
It also found that other types of drug-prevention programs were more effective than DARE, which places a police officer in fifth- and sixth-grade classes for one hour a week over 17 weeks.
Additionally, a 1993 study by the Research Triangle Institute found that DARE helped give children the social skills to say no to drugs, but had a “limited to essentially nonexistent effect” on overall drug use by children.
But police Officer Larry Zettler, who teaches the program at Our Lady of the Rosary and instructed the sixth-graders, said the students got the message the program intended.
“Why they responded the way they responded, I don't know,” Officer Zettler said. “I'm not convinced 100 percent of kids knew (the student) had it.”
Mrs. Grubb said parents, parish members and school principals called the school Wednesday to applaud the approach taken by administrators.
Jim Robisch, parent of a sixth-grader, said that while the situation is unfortunate, he is pleased by the way the school handled it.
“Drugs are an issue that you can't take lightly,” he said.
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