VENTURA : School Anti-Drug Program to Expand

An anti-drug education program in Ventura elementary schools will be expanded this fall to include the city’s four middle schools, Ventura police officials said Thursday.

The Police Department, which coordinates the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program for the Ventura Unified School District, is working this summer on a curriculum that will be presented to seventh-graders during the upcoming school year.

The department supplies three specially trained officers for the DARE programs at elementary schools and will assign one more officer for the seventh-grade program. The new program also will have a new name: Middle School DARE/GIARY, which stands for Gang Involved At Risk Youth.

Although the program will educate the youngsters on the dangers of drug and gang involvement, it also will deal with other problems facing the district’s nearly 1,100 seventh-graders, said Ric Nargie, director of pupil services for the school district.

The California Office of Criminal Justice has provided a $50,000 grant, the bulk of the needed start-up money for the new program. The Police Department is contributing $16,600 and the Downtown Ventura Lions Club has donated $15,000.

The money will be used to hire a new police officer to replace the veteran officer chosen to work full time presenting DARE/GIARY classes at Anacapa, Balboa, Cabrillo and De Anza middle schools.

The middle school program will continue the message offered in lower grades. About 1,800 fifth-graders participate in DARE, and then go through the sixth-grade QUEST program, which teaches life skills for adolescents.

“The elementary school is just the place to begin, not the place to stop,” said Police Chief Richard Thomas. “The three programs will be kind of like a washing-machine cycle for the students. Each grade that passes through will be cleansed even more.”

The implementation of the new program will provide seventh-graders with help in making choices, Nargie said.

“It’ll give them accurate information about the sort of dangerous effects of substance abuse,” he said. “It gives them some coping mechanisms to deal with peer pressure, and through the program they can build some of their self-esteem so that they know that they’re an OK person and don’t have to use drugs to deal with their problems.”