Coordination Seen as Key to Drug Programs

All 28 school districts in Orange County have one or more kinds of anti-drug programs in operation.

And school officials, when contacted for comment, invariably say they think the programs are steering youngsters away from drugs. But the same officials usually concede they can offer no statistics or other hard evidence to prove the success of their anti-drug programs.

William Wong, an official in the Anaheim Union High School District who implemented a comprehensive anti-drug plan for district schools, said the program appears to be working very well. But, similar to officials in many other school districts, Wong said he has no statistics or objective evaluation data.

“I don’t know what I could point to,” said Wong, who is now principal of Savanna High School in Anaheim. The subject, he said, is a very difficult one to quantify and evaluate.

“Much of the information is confidential to protect the students,” Wong said.

Out of concern that the proliferation of anti-drug programs in Orange County are “fragmented and uncoordinated,” the 1986-87 Orange County Grand Jury announced last week that it is investigating the programs used by school and governmental agencies in the county.

In a recent survey of county school districts and other governmental agencies, the Grand Jury found that “there are at least 48 different (drug-abuse prevention) programs in operation in the county,” according to an interim report released by jurors last week.

Great Fragmentation

That report also said that “there is great fragmentation” among the programs and services provided by cities, school districts and county organizations.

“We decided at one of our first meetings that alcohol and drug abuse are one of our top concerns,” said James V. Robinson II, foreman of the current grand jury. “We wanted to find out something about the programs. But we found there is no clearinghouse on the information. There are many programs, but there’ve been few evaluations of them.”

Bert Simpson, who heads drug-education efforts for the Orange County Department of Education, said he has no evaluations of the 28 school districts in the county and their individual anti-drug programs. Currently there “is no coordinating system (on drug-education plans) among the schools,” Simpson said.

But in February, he said the county department will sponsor a gathering of school district officials to discuss “what works and what doesn’t.”

Robinson, the grand jury foreman, was critical of the Orange County Department of Education. “If there were a coordinating agency, one would think that the county Department of Education would be that agency,” he said.

Used by 20 Districts

In the grand jury’s interim report on its study of drug-abuse prevention programs, it said that it found DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is the program being used by 20 of Orange County’s 28 school districts.

DARE, designed by the Los Angeles Police Department, usually involves instruction by uniformed police officers. Not all districts in the county have full DARE programs, however. For instance, Santa Ana Unified is currently phasing in DARE in all its fifth grades after having started the program last year as a pilot project in three schools.

DARE has drawn praise in both Orange and Los Angeles counties, but there is no definitive study of its effectiveness. The comments in its support are generally anecdotal; statements by persons who like it and think it works.

For instance, in Garden Grove Unified School District, sixth-grade students who heard a policewoman give DARE anti-drug lectures later wrote enthusiastic reports.

“I enjoy the DARE program,” wrote one Garden Grove sixth grader. “I think it helps me to know how to say ‘No’ to someone if they ask me to take drugs.”

Statistical Data Absent

Solid information, however, would not be available about the DARE program in Garden Grove unless a subsequent study tracked the sixth graders through high school to see whether they actually resisted drugs. Such statistical data are absent from most anti-drug programs so far.

Perhaps the only anti-drug program to be formally evaluated, with objective data, is the STAR (Social Thinking and Reasoning) project used in the Irvine Unified School District.

“We were unusual, and very lucky, in that we received a $50,000 grant to study and evaluate the effectiveness of our STAR program,” said Irvine Deputy Supt. Bruce Givner. “That evaluation showed that the STAR project produced outstanding results.”

The STAR anti-drug program was designed and executed by teachers and administrators in Irvine Unified, beginning in 1980. “It’s home-grown,” said Givner. “We got a $100,000 grant from the state to finance the plan. Yes, we could have used other existing (drug-education) models, but we decided to design our own, and it had very good results in getting teachers and staff involved.”

Givner said STAR is a program that “teaches students how to deal with peer pressure and other social skills” at the junior-high level and is woven into regular classes, such as history and social science. Most studies, he said, indicate that young drug abusers are people who have trouble socially adjusting to fellow students.

STAR began as “a pilot project at the sixth through eighth grade levels,” Givner said, adding that about 500 “high risk” students--those whose poor academic and behavior performance indicated they might be headed for drug use--were targeted during the test phase in the early 1980s.

About 250 of the students were in the STAR project, and 250 in the “control group,” which received the district’s regular drug counseling and assistance. In 1983, after the junior high students had progressed into high school, the $50,000 evaluation project was begun. “We followed the kids through high school, and we were able to compare academics and attendance and other factors,” he said.

Test results showed that students who had STAR anti-drug education in junior high did much better in high school, Givner said. “The project students had less substance abuse, better academic performance, better attendance rates and related better socially with other students.”

As a result, he said, Irvine Unified is implementing STAR programs in all of its sixth through eighth grades this year.

Evaluation Funding

Givner said he sympathizes with the plight of other school districts that don’t have special funds to evaluate their anti-drug programs. “It was a rare circumstance for us in getting that money for the evaluation,” he said.

Nonetheless, Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp said last year that all school districts, and other sponsors of anti-drug programs, ought to be required to evaluate their programs periodically. Van de Kamp proposed that 10% of the funding for an anti-drug project ought to be earmarked just for follow-up and evaluation of how well the project worked.

The Orange County Grand Jury, while as yet having made no specific recommendations, also is stressing the need for accountability of the anti-drug programs. “We’d like to see better coordination of the programs and evaluation of their services,” Robinson said.