8 S.D. Officers DARE to Teach 6th Graders the Dangers of Drugs

On Monday, eight San Diego police officers will be taking on a new assignment. For the duration of the school year, they will be teaching elementary school.

The officers--volunteers--will be bringing a new drug awareness program to sixth graders at 36 of the San Diego Unified School District’s 120 elementary schools. Based on a program that has been operating in Los Angeles for four years, the San Diego version of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) will focus on helping students understand the potential dangers of drug use and develop the ability to resist peer pressure to take drugs.

“I think it’s great,” said Diana Shipley, principal of Jefferson Elementary School in North Park. “I was a junior high school counselor and I know we have to start addressing the drug problem at the elementary school level. The kids are not too young to hear about these things, as we used to think.”

Speaking at a school board meeting Monday, Police Chief Bill Kolender called drugs “the No. 1 problem in our society today” and said that it would not be solved unless police officers become involved in prevention as well as enforcement.

“If we’ve done something to prevent drug use, we’ve saved the citizens a lot of suffering and a lot of pain,” Kolender said.

Offered in 33 States

The DARE program is offered in 33 states, and school officials here say the key to its success is its focus on the emotional and psychological pressures facing children and adolescents. The 17 one-hour sessions that make up the course include discussions of how to build a better sense of self-esteem, how to be more assertive and how to decide when a risk is worth taking.

“People have a mind-set that drug education is pharmacology, but the main part of it is learning how to deal with your peers and how to say ‘no,’ ” said Earl Krepelin, the district’s coordinator of Social Concerns Programs. “We still have problems with that as adults.”

Although the San Diego Unified School District has been offering drug education classes since the 1960s, this is the first time police officers will be participating.

An evaluation of DARE’s success in Los Angeles showed students coming out of the program with more negative attitudes toward smoking, drinking and drug use and more positive attitudes toward the police.

Even more impressive to local school officials was data showing that students were doing better in school, after participating in DARE.

Grades Up, Absenteeism Down

“In L.A., they found that in schools that had DARE, test scores and grades went up and absenteeism went down,” Krepelin said. “Students saw more importance in school. That was, of course, important to us as educators.”

For the police officers involved, the appeal of the program is the opportunity to reach people before they start using drugs, instead of after.

“Working in the patrol car, I could see that parents and kids needed to be taught these things and now I’ll be teaching them,” said Officer Renee Saffles.

Saffles, an eight-year veteran of the force, said that the two-week training session she and the officers attended to prepare for their experience in the classroom was the most intense experience of her career so far.

“There was so much subject matter and it was completely new to us,” Saffles said. “We’re all real nervous. It’s different than being out on the street arresting people. You may think that’s scary, but standing in front of a classroom with 30 pairs of eyes staring at you, that’s really scary.”