SCHOOLS VS. DRUGS : The Scare Tactics and Lectures Are Scuttled as Awareness Programs Start in Kindergarten : By PAMELA MORELAND, <i> Times Staff Writer</i>

A quiet revolution has dramatically changed the way schools combat drug abuse and nowhere can this change in strategy be seen better than in the school districts that serve the San Fernando Valley area.

Scare tactics, pharmacology lessons and moralizing are out.

In their place are programs that bring uniformed police officers into the classroom to teach students drug-resistance techniques. Games aimed at improving students’ self-esteem and self-awareness have been added to the curriculum.

And there are parent education classes where they talk about parents’ own attitudes and experiences with drugs and how these influence their children.

This new drug education is also aimed at a younger audience. Some drug-awareness programs start in kindergarten because a growing number of child psychologists say that discussing drug abuse in the sixth grade is often too late.

Educators readily admit that anti-drug programs of the past failed.

“If we taught reading the way we teach children about drugs, we would have a nation of illiterates,” said Dr. Guy Dalis, a health-education specialist with the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

New Approaches Fill Gaps

These same educators are quick to add that the new approaches fill the gaps created by previous anti-drug courses. But while the new programs are more lively than classes of the past, there is little data to show that the current classroom anti-drug push is doing any better than earlier programs.

This fall, new anti-drug pilot programs will be launched in the Burbank, Simi Valley, Hart and Pleasant Valley school districts. Project DARE, for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, the cooperative program between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District, will be expanded to every elementary and junior high school in the district.

And for the first time many community and public agencies have offered to help schools develop and fund anti-drug programs.

In Simi Valley, Kiwanis and Lions clubs have donated money to send teachers to special anti-drug workshops and paid for new anti-drug textbooks. In Thousand Oaks, the city’s recreation department runs a drug intervention program at Thousand Oaks High School featuring group counseling for teen-agers with drug problems and separate parent counseling.

“Maybe the business community has gotten involved because they realize that these kids are the next generation of workers,” said Tom Black, supervisor of student welfare for the Simi Valley Unified School District. “I don’t care why they’re involved. I’m just glad they’re here and working with us.”

Began Several Years Ago

The change in school anti-drug programs started seven or eight years ago--long before the highly publicized drug deaths of comedian John Belushi and athletes Len Bias and Don Rogers. Previously, there were two primary ways teachers tried to persuade students that using drugs was harmful--by frightening them or by long lectures on the chemical makeup of drugs and the health side effects of drug use.

For different reasons, both methods failed, educators and physicians agree.

“The big scare failed for two reasons. First because zealots starting giving out misinformation. We told kids that if they took a puff of a marijuana cigarette they’d be shooting heroin the next day. That isn’t true, and when you lie to a child, you lose him,” said Dr. Richard Tower, author of “How Schools Can Combat Drug Abuse,” a book to be published by the National Education Assn. Professional Library this fall.

“Secondly, teen-agers live in the present. The future really doesn’t exist for them,” Tower said. “So when we’d show them dead bodies of drug users, they couldn’t believe that someday they could be a dead body in a morgue.”

When educators realized that scare tactics were not working, they decided to try straight talk about what chemicals did to the body.

‘Piqued Their Curiosity’

“Instead of turning kids off from drugs, research showed that we piqued their curiosity,” Tower said. “When we told kids that after smoking marijuana you felt a floating sensation, they were thinking, ‘Hey, I’d like to try that.’ ”

Educators said they felt helpless. They knew they were losing the war. And if that belief needed any statistical reinforcement, it came with a 1985 survey conducted by Rodney Skager, associate dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education, of 7,379 California seventh-, ninth- and 11th-graders.

According to the survey, 10.7% of the seventh-graders reported using illegal drugs at least once. Nearly 58% said they had tried alcohol, and 15.8% admitted they had become drunk.

Among the ninth-graders, 35.7% said they had tried drugs; 77.6% said they had tried alcohol, and 47.1% said they had become intoxicated.

Of the 11th-graders surveyed, 51.4% reported trying drugs; 85% said they had tried alcohol at least once, and 65.2% said they had gotten drunk. One of every 13 students in this age group said they used marijuana every day.

Most Likely Users

White students were more likely to use alcohol and marijuana than any other racial or ethnic group. Asian students were least likely to try drugs or alcohol.

A new method was needed, but educators said they did not know which way to turn until a University of Houston study on teen-age cigarette smoking was published in the late 1970s.

According to Richard I. Evans, director of the university’s department of social psychology behavioral medicine research group, his team wanted to find out why some teen-agers smoke cigarettes and others do not. To do this, the Evans group used hidden videotape cameras to observe students outside schools.

“We found that, when offered a cigarette by a peer, many teen-agers were successful in refusing the offer by simply saying ‘No,’ ” Evans said.

“Most times, just a simple ‘no’ was enough. But when it wasn’t, we saw that the non-smoking teen-agers were coming up with their own rationalization tactics,” he said. “The kids either said something like ‘I thought you were my friend, why do you want to get me hooked on that stuff?’ or ‘Don’t you know what cigarettes can do to you?’.”

‘Strategies Usually Enough’

“These youthful counterpressure strategies were usually enough to get the kids out of the situation,” Evans said.

When the University of Houston report was published, health educators latched onto the results, figuring that “if just saying ‘no’ works with cigarette smoking, then it can work with drugs,” said Dr. Ruth Rich, health-education specialist with the Los Angeles school district.

With that, the “Just Say No” movement was born and drug abuse education was changed.

Curriculum designers decided not to scrap all of their previous drug-education programs. The straight talk about drugs and the effect they have on the body was retained. Added to this was what educators call “social inoculation.”

“We need to start teaching children skills they can put to use immediately for situations” in which they currently find themselves, said Sgt. Keith Parks, a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy who is the Camarillo substation youth and anti-drug program liaison officer with the Pleasant Valley School District.

“We have to teach children about peer pressure and that it takes a lot of strength to say ‘no.’ We have to give children an opportunity to practice saying ‘no’ and we have to teach them to recognize the consequences of their decisions,” Parks said.

Several Programs Copied

Although individual school districts take different approaches in presenting anti-drug courses, there are several programs that have been copied throughout the area.

The most popular is Project DARE, a program developed by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles school district. Uniformed police officers are assigned to an elementary school where they visit each classroom to discuss how to say “no” to drugs and guide games that involve children simulating situations in which they are offered drugs.

A Simi Valley version of the DARE program, featuring officers from that city’s Police Department, will begin this fall in elementary schools. The Burbank and Glendale police departments and deputies from the Malibu sheriff’s substation--which serves Westlake Village, Agoura Hills and Calabasas--have been trained by the Los Angeles Police Department for DARE programs.

Project Impact--a program designed for older students who have been identified as drug abusers or who are considered high risk--can be found in many Los Angeles and Conejo district high schools.

Students involved in Project Impact meet individually with an adviser who is on the school’s counseling staff. There are also regular group sessions with other Impact members. Parents of Impact students have their own group sessions with program counselors.

‘Looking at You, 2000’

Another popular program is called “Looking at You, 2000.” Developed in Washington state and aimed at elementary school students, the goals of “Looking at You” are to promote self-awareness and teach students peer pressure resistance techniques.

Jefferson Elementary School in Burbank will have a “Looking at You” program this year.

Simi Valley schools are launching an ambitious anti-drug program that has taken more than a year to develop. In addition to the DARE program, which will be used in six elementary schools by the end of the year, seventh-graders at Hillside Junior High will be part of an intensive anti-drug program.

Every seventh-grader will receive special textbooks and workbooks that focus on building character. Chapters tackle topics such as peer relationships, strengthening the family, decision making and setting goals. Parents will be asked to attend evening programs that will cover topics such as drug abuse and adolescence. There is even a textbook for parents called “The Surprising Years.”

“The schools have always cried that they shouldered the burden of correcting society’s ills. That’s one reason why this new generation of drug education places so much importance on getting parents involved,” Tower said.

“Many times, teen-age drug abuse is a symptom of some kind of dysfunction, some kind of turmoil within the family,” he said. “By getting the parent involved, sometimes we can get to the root of the problem.”

The Pleasant Valley School District, which serves Camarillo, is set to launch a pilot anti-drug program at Dos Caminos Elementary School this year that will involve sixth-graders and members of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Weekly Sessions

According to Ventura County youth officer Parks, deputies will meet with students every other week. There will be role-playing games, lessons on self-esteem, self-identity, understanding peer pressure and the consequences of decision making.

“Kids seem to learn a lot when they actively participate, so we want to give them every opportunity to get involved,” Parks said.

When the students move on to junior high school, Parker said, he would like to meet with the group once a month to discuss their experiences and give “reinforcement” lessons.

Research to determine if these new programs actually reduce student drug use is virtually non-existent, according to Margaret Thomas, a researcher with Santa Monica-based Rand Corp.

“It’s too early for documented results. But a lot of organizations are working on it,” Thomas said.

Rand is conducting a survey of more than 7,000 Oregon and California students who participated in a drug-resistance training program in elementary school. Last year, when they were seventh-graders, Rand researchers surveyed them about drug experiences and each child submitted a saliva sample that would reveal the presence of drugs.

Similar Survey Planned

A similar survey and saliva test will be administered this year. Results of this testing will be ready early next year, Thomas said.

The Los Angeles Police Commission paid for a research project--part of a $60,000, five-year program--that will compare 2,000 students who participated in the DARE program to 2,000 who did not, to determine whether there is any difference in their drug experiences.

According to Lt. Roger Coombs, who heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s drug abuse education unit, last year seventh-graders were surveyed by the Evaluation and Training Institute of Los Angeles, a private research firm. The company will re-interview those students this year and the report should be released in 1987.

An evaluation of the DARE program, written last year by the same firm, concluded that:

“Students reportedly have more negative attitudes about smoking, drinking and drug use, have increased their levels of self-esteem and are taking more responsibility for their action, are able to say ‘no’ to various types of negative behavior and have more positive attitudes toward police officers.”