DARE Survives Early Doubts : L.A. Drug Effort Takes On International Dimensions

Los Angeles school board member Rita Walters walked out of the boardroom the day that Police Chief Daryl F. Gates announced plans to take his department’s war on drugs into the classroom.

“He was running for mayor at the time and I saw it as a grandstand political play,” Walters said, recalling the 1983 meeting.

The Los Angeles Police Commission, too, had questions when Gates first proposed taking some of his best police officers off the streets and putting them into city schools as teachers. One commissioner, Barbara Schlei, criticized the project as a waste of taxpayer money and a troubling law enforcement intrusion into education.

Six years later, some early doubters are still not convinced about the long-range effectiveness of Gates’ project. But his Drug Abuse Resistance Education program--a tough anti-drug curriculum delivered with almost evangelical zeal--has not only survived its rocky start, it has taken on national and international dimensions.

What began in 1983 as a pilot project in 50 Los Angeles grade schools has become one of the most widely praised and fastest growing programs of its kind in the United States--reaching 3 million students this year. Now used in every elementary school in Los Angeles, the DARE curriculum has also been adopted by school districts in more than 1,100 other communities in 48 states, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and U.S. Defense Department schools overseas.

DARE’s phenomenal growth--from its original 10-member unit to its current level of 83 officers, costing $8 million a year in salaries and materials--is partly the result of the department’s aggressive marketing. An equally important factor has been DARE’S reputation for success. Praise has come from students, teachers, parents and politicians--including President Bush, who singled out DARE in a recent speech in Pennsylvania.

Yet six years into a program that LAPD officials see as the best hope for turning an entire generation away from drugs, DARE is still hobbled by problems in its own back yard:

- Despite lobbying efforts by the LAPD, Gov. George Deukmejian and other state officials have resisted pressure to mandate the DARE program for all California schools

- Even in Los Angeles, DARE faces strong competition from other drug education programs, most notably the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s SANE program, an anti-drug curriculum that attaches less importance to uniformed officers in the classroom.

- Although early studies show some reduction in narcotics use by students exposed to DARE, critics say there is yet no conclusive proof that DARE or any similar program can substantially reduce the nation’s drug woes.

In the face of these troubles and a drug epidemic that has defied all solutions, DARE’s supporters maintain their fervent belief in the program and indignantly dismiss criticism.

“I could see this was the answer from the beginning,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Glenn Levant, who oversees the DARE program and all narcotics operations of the LAPD. “If it didn’t flourish, then God help us.

“I thought it would be mandated in every school district in the country by now,” Levant added.

Severity of Problem

What criticism DARE has aroused is muted by a recognition of the overall severity of the nation’s drug crisis and a need for drastic action. Former Police Commissioner Schlei, who still has serious reservations about DARE, prefaces her criticisms by saying that “all of us welcome every positive effort” to end drug abuse.

“In a democracy,” she said, “a separation of your police from your schools is really crucially important. If it worked, it would be worth it at any price. But it’s a very troubling civil liberties issue when we don’t know if it will be worth it at all.”

At the heart of the DARE program is a 17-week curriculum for elementary school students--the intent being to catch children before they enter junior high, when they are most susceptible to peer group pressure.

The DARE curriculum begins with lessons on the role of police, the harmful effects of drugs, consequences of drug use and the kinds of peer pressures children face from friends and other students. As the course progresses, the emphasis shifts to ways to say no when people offer drugs, the building of self-esteem, assertiveness training, stress management techniques, decision-making and risk-taking.

The conclusion of the course is a graduation ceremony in which students read aloud personal commitments to avoid drug use.

“I’m taking a stand against drugs,” said Vanessa Clunis, a graduating fifth-grader at Melvin Avenue School in the San Fernando Valley. “I have seen the way it affects people. I know, for now, I will not take drugs. I would never make drugs my friend.”

Sometimes, the programs take on the overtones of a consciousness-raising gathering. On a recent Thursday at an Encino school, Officer Kirk Buchannan was nearing the halfway point in the DARE curriculum, telling a group of fifth-graders how to reduce stress without resorting to alcohol or drugs.

After recounting a story about a neighbor who used alcohol to control stress only to crash his car into his front yard mailbox during a medical emergency, Buchannan suggested that a better way of handling stress is to learn deep-breathing techniques.

“Fold your hands on your stomach and close your eyes,” he said. “Now dream about being on a tropical island. Breathe in deeply to the count of three and breath out to the count of six.”

The students hushed as they joined in with Buchannan. When they finished, he told them that their homework assignment was to use deep-breathing techniques the next time they argued with their parents.

Despite the occasional New Age trappings, most DARE class lectures take a tough approach to the dangers of drugs, focusing on health dangers and the negative effect of drugs on the users’ ability to function in society.

Police officers who serve as DARE instructors sometimes uncover students’ family horror stories. Levant says that officers are told about parental cocaine use about once a week, duly reporting the tips to school officials, who in turn notify juvenile authorities.

Richard Stocks, a former Sherman Oaks vice principal who joined the LAPD nine years ago and DARE in 1984, encountered one of the most serious parental abuse problems at a San Fernando Valley school.

“After just one day, I got a call from my supervisor that there was a young boy who wanted to talk to me and nobody else,” Stocks recalled. “His father was coming home and locking him and his brother out on the patio all night while he and his friends shot heroin and cocaine. The boy told me he didn’t mind not getting dinner, but he was tired of having to go to the bathroom in the bushes.”

Arrest Averted

Stocks notified police juvenile authorities, but the father of the two boys had been rushed by relatives to a drug rehabilitation program before he could be arrested. The boys were placed in the custody of their grandfather.

Program officials say that during such incidents, they have been careful to avoid creating civil liberties problems by keeping DARE officers out of any active law enforcement role in the schools.

In classrooms throughout Los Angeles, there are constant reminders that despite the best efforts of LAPD’s classroom cops, there is no sure way to predict whether students exposed to DARE training can be taught to overcome narcotics abuse in their homes and neighborhoods.

It is a lesson that Officer Gregory White learned at an elementary school in South-Central Los Angeles. After assigning students in his class on self-esteem to write one compliment about themselves, White asked one boy what he had written.

“I’m bad,” the student said.

“The Michael Jackson bad or the going-to-jail bad?” White asked.

“Both,” the boy responded.

That attitude among students was partly responsible for the creation of DARE in the first place. The idea came to Chief Gates after watching years of undercover drug operations in the city’s schools. Each year, there were more arrests and narcotics seizures, but no reduction in drug usage.

By 1983, it was evident to Gates that traditional police tactics alone could never solve the drug problem. Gates saw drug education in the schools as the crucial missing ingredient, but he thought it would have to go beyond the usual message that drugs are harmful.

Gates’ view was that children should be taught specific ways of resisting peer pressure to use drugs. They would have to be taught basic values and self-worth, and overall instruction about drugs would have to come from people with real-life expertise that children would respect.

Offer Accepted

The police chief approached Los Angeles School Supt. Harry Handler, offering to commit 10 uniformed officers to a pilot drug education program covering 50 elementary schools. Despite reservations from school officials like Walters, who believed that the program was being forced upon them, Handler accepted and assigned Dr. Ruth Rich, a specialist in health education, to prepare an acceptable curriculum.

Rich also had doubts. “I thought: What are we going to do with cops in the classroom?” Rich recalled. “I didn’t know if police officers could be teachers or how they would be received by the children.”

Working over the summer of 1983, she modified an anti-smoking program developed at USC into the 17-week curriculum now used by DARE in fifth and sixth grades throughout the city.

Rich and some school officials soon began changing their minds about DARE as students raved about their police instructors and teachers spread word about the children’s reactions. By 1985, DARE had expanded to grade schools throughout the city.

Today it reaches all 352 public elementary schools as well as 58 junior highs in the city. By this fall, an estimated 600,000 children from kindergarten through high school in the city of Los Angeles will be exposed to DARE during the school year.

Despite DARE’s sweeping success in Los Angeles, it has had a cooler reception from state officials.

While praising the program’s goals and claims of success, Deukmejian and other officials have avoided passing judgment on DARE’s merits. Officials are wary of forcing the program upon smaller rural police departments and school districts that have nowhere near the personnel and funding that the LAPD and the Los Angeles school board can muster.

Other Considerations

State authorities have also held back from embracing DARE for fear of alienating proponents of other drug education programs--most specifically the Los Angeles County sheriff’s SANE program.

Deukmejian proposed an increase in state spending on drug education and prevention in California schools from $1.9 million to $20 million for the coming year, but he has not specified a single approach.

“Quite frankly, I don’t think we are in a position to chose whether DARE or SANE has a better approach,” said G. Albert Howenstein, executive director of the governor’s office of criminal justice planning.

Complaints arose from police officials soon after the Sheriff’s Department created SANE in 1985 that Sheriff Sherman Block was creating a rivalry by establishing a program with a different name.

Crusading to have DARE mandated for all California school districts, LAPD officials say that state officials cannot be expected to agree to such a move as long as the two major law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County differ over their programs.

“We should have a statewide DARE program,” LAPD Chief Gates said in a recent interview. “I’ve talked to Sherm, and urged him to use the generic term DARE. I don’t think there’s any question that this situation creates a dilemma for the governor.”

Despite delivering the same message about drugs offered by DARE, the Sheriff Department’s program differs by its greater reliance on regular classroom teachers to do much of the training.

The first Sheriff’s Department SANE officers were trained by the LAPD, and the Sheriff’s Department approached DARE officials in late 1985 to explore the possibility of a name change. Negotiations ended when DARE officials ruled that the program name could not be used unless the Sheriff’s Department was willing to follow the LAPD curriculum to the letter and make a manpower commitment in the classroom equal to that of the LAPD.

The Sheriff’s Department has not been willing to take as many officers as the LAPD does off the streets for classroom duties. But there is also a strong philosophical disagreement over whether uniformed police should totally dominate school drug programs.

“The truth is (the LAPD has) far more manpower than we do,” Block said. “Secondly, we felt that if the teachers were part of the program, they could reinforce the lessons throughout the year.”

The SANE program also differs from DARE in its scope. While the LAPD has aggressively marketed its program throughout the nation, the Sheriff’s Department has limited its efforts to county areas. “There are 5 million people in this county who don’t live in the city of Los Angeles, and that is the group whose children we want to reach,” Block said.

“Unlike the city, which has only one school board making decisions, we are looking at 54 different school districts,” Block added. “For that reason, we use four different curricula. A single curriculum like DARE doesn’t work for us.”

Early studies have been supportive of DARE’s single curriculum. But the results are not conclusive.

The program is being studied in Illinois, Hawaii, Wyoming, Indiana and Kentucky, but the most comprehensive is a continuing survey of DARE students that has been under way in Los Angeles since the program’s beginning in 1983.

The local study, conducted by the Evaluation and Training Institute of Los Angeles, a private educational research firm, has concluded thus far that the DARE students showed significantly lower rates of drug usage.

The study tracked 498 DARE students at the eighth-grade level in 1987, comparing their drug and alcohol use to 163 students who did not receive DARE training. About 69% of the eighth-graders who had taken DARE classes three years earlier reported that they had never had a drink of beer, compared to 55% of those who did not receive DARE training.

About 90% said they never drank hard liquor, compared to 88% of the non-DARE students. About 95% of the students in both groups said they never used marijuana.

While the numbers of students involved in the survey are too small to qualify as an accurate sample of all DARE and non-DARE students, Evaluation and Training Institute President Claire Rose called the differences significant. She said that even small percentage differences between the two groups are important statistical signs that DARE is having an effect.

“It would be unrealistic to expect that students in any program like DARE will be entirely drug-free,” she said. “But I think any difference is exciting given the fact that these students are not receiving a continuous program.”

Former Police Commissioner Schlei, challenging the value of the studies, said she still has serious doubts about the expansion of DARE.

“The evaluation that has been undertaken is both incomplete and has an inadequate sampling upon which to base conclusions,” she said, adding: “There are enough officers involved now to make a real difference to the safety of our citizens on the streets and in their homes.”

But to LAPD officials, the statistical data reflects the personal testimony of police, teachers and children that DARE packs an emotional wallop on everyone involved.

“The best news is that it works,” said Deputy LAPD Chief Levant. “It works as well in Los Angeles as in Virginia, as in Hawaii, as in South Carolina. No other program can say that. We’ve got it and we are giving it away to anyone who wants to implement it. It’s a tragedy for children anywhere if they do not receive this kind of training.”