Spokane, Oakland Dare to Drop DARE Anti-Drug Curriculum

It is the nation’s most popular drug-education program, offered in at least 60% of school districts nationwide, reaching 25 million youngsters here and in 41 other countries.

It is a program that has drawn praise for its efforts to bring uniformed police officers into the classroom to promote self-esteem and clean living. Even Chelsea Clinton is a graduate.

But you don’t DARE in Spokane.

Last year, spurred by a budget crunch and concerns that the program does not work, Spokane joined a handful of cities that are just saying no to Drug Abuse Resistance Education.

Oakland, Calif., ended its $750,000-a-year DARE commitment two years ago, said City Councilwoman Sheila Jordan. “I felt like it was a very expensive program with very poor results.”

Seattle may soon follow suit. Police Chief Norm Stamper wants to remove the four-officer, $250,000-a-year program from next year’s budget.

“We’re now beginning to recognize that this enormously popular and enormously expensive program has been from a statistical point of view an enormous failure,” he said.

The cut won’t go unnoticed, he said.

“The problem is that DARE is identified with everything that is good and important and desirable. It is in many ways a symbol, like the American flag,” Stamper said.

DARE started in Los Angeles in 1983, a brainchild of then-Police Chief Daryl Gates. “It’s grass roots, it’s truly a local program,” said Bill Alden, deputy director of DARE America, the program’s Los Angeles-based, nonprofit parent corporation.

“Parents feel good about it . . . because [DARE officers] create these sound, positive relationships with kids at a very early age.”

But this comes at a cost. The cost to Spokane was $557,000 a year.

Most of the DARE budget went to cover the salaries of six full-time officers and staff, said Sgt. Mike Prim, who is coordinating the home-grown anti-drug effort Spokane will offer instead.

A $20,000 chunk went for what Prim calls “DARE-phernalia”--T-shirts, pencils, stickers and bracelets bearing the program’s red-on-black logo.

With the national program, you “acquire the logo and the look,” Mayor Jack Geraghty said, and there “may be other approaches we can use.”

“We’re not taking on DARE, we’re just trying to develop a program that is more compatible with our community,” he said, noting DARE’s copyright curriculum doesn’t allow local tinkering without approval.

Spokane’s replacement program is expected to cost about $150,000 a year less, Prim said. It will involve 30 patrol officers on a part-time basis, visiting classrooms from kindergarten to eighth grade.

DARE’s core lessons are taught weekly for 17 weeks to fifth- or sixth-graders. Follow-up sessions are available, but schools don’t always offer them.

About $200 million a year is spent on DARE nationwide, DARE America spokeswoman Patricia Johnson said. That includes locally paid salaries for DARE officers, federal grants for five regional training centers and corporate support.

DARE plans to ask Congress for $50 million to expand its curriculum into more middle schools, Alden noted. That would be matched by $50 million in private donations.

About 400 law-enforcement agencies signed up for DARE last year, Johnson said, and only a few dumped the program.

Among the recent converts is New York City, where 100 officers and some supervisors will be trained to teach DARE’s curriculum full time in 1,100 schools. The cost: $8.8 million a year.

“It’s a proven program which I believe has been well received nationwide,” Police Commissioner Howard Safir said. “The way they train their officers, they become real role models for kids.”

That’s important, he said, though “it’s much harder to measure whether DARE, or any drug-education program, actually reduces drug use.”

But some recent studies have tried to do just that, and have found DARE wanting. A University of Kentucky study released in June said that DARE lessons taught in elementary schools stay with children into the seventh grade, but fade after that.

And a review of eight previous studies by scientists at Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina concluded that DARE imparts a large amount of information, but has little or no impact on students’ drug use.

DARE officials dispute these findings. They point to a 1993 Gallup Poll of students 11 to 18 who completed the DARE program; more than 90% said they believed DARE helped them avoid drugs and alcohol and handle peer pressure. And 93% of those surveyed said they had never used drugs.

Still, overall teen drug use has risen sharply in the last four years, a recent government report concluded.

Monthly drug use among 12- to 17-year-olds--of marijuana, cocaine and LSD and other hallucinogens--rose from 5.3% in 1992 to 10.9% in 1995, according to the Department of Health and Human Services survey. Previous surveys showed teen drug use reached its lowest rate in 1992 after a decade of decline.

“If these programs are so good, why do we have substance abuse at the levels that we do?” said Rodney Skager, a professor of education at UCLA.

DARE officials say rising teen drug use is a reason to expand the program, not cut it.

“We think the numbers would be dramatically higher if it weren’t for DARE,” Alden said.