New curriculum would target grades 5-8
By Hayden Seder
Children as young as 10 years old will be taught about the dangers of drug abuse starting with a pilot program this spring, the Blaine County Board of Education unanimously decided last week. By next school year, the school district will launch a comprehensive curriculum for students from fifth to eighth grade aimed at curbing substance abuse and increasing graduation rates among teens.
Concern for the national trend toward vaping in pre-high school students, drug violations by local students, a lack of programming for grades six through seven, and the loss of the D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program was the impetus behind the district’s new curriculum.
“Our students are encountering drugs at a younger and younger age than they used to, so it’s important that these students, even in the fifth grade, receive an education on drug abuse and staying away from it,” said Kelly Green, school board trustee.
To create the proposed curriculum for each grade, the Blaine County School District Board Wellness Committee assessed the substance problems being seen in schools, what was currently in place in schools to deal with the issues, and where additional resources were needed to curb illegal substance use by students, said Ellen Mandeville, school board trustee, who serves as liaison to the Wellness Committee.
Shedding light on the need for enhanced drug awareness education was a variety of data collected by the Wellness Committee and the Drug Coalition who partnered with the school district in spring 2018. Among the more startling findings: that of the 24 students who failed to graduate in 2017, nearly half of them had known substance abuse issues for years.
“One notable outcome of the 2017-2018 Wellness Committee work was the decision to be proactive with student and family substance education in our elementary schools,” Mandeville said. “We wanted students to be forewarned about the negative physical impacts of illegal substance abuse, and thereby forearmed to make wise personal choices.”
Substance abuse awareness and prevention at the fifth-grade level is nothing new. Typically, the D.A.R.E. program educated fifth graders in concert with local law enforcement, but over the last decade the program has been minimized at the elementary level nationally. Law enforcement no longer participates in the program, which has largely been relegated to one week of instruction known as Red Ribbon Week. The new drug curriculum will be added to the existing Great Body Shop curriculum, which is the overall health program for fifth grade.
Drug prevention and awareness education has not historically been included in any sixth- or seventh-grade curriculums. Instead, focus was placed on a two-week unit on substance abuse held in eighth-grade health class. The new curriculum will add a supplemental education in grades six and seven called Project ALERT. The program has a two-year core curriculum consisting of 11 lessons that are taught once a week. Project ALERT was created and tested by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. Developed over a 10-year period, Project ALERT addresses the pro-drug mindset of today’s teens and effectively increases their likelihood to remain drug free.
A Project ALERT pilot program will take place over three weeks to all seventh-grade students at Ernest Hemingway STEAM School in Ketchum in February and March of 2019. Three lessons will be taught which combine motivating non-use, identifying pressures to use drugs, learning to resist those pressures and practicing resistance skills. This pilot will be used to see how students respond to the curriculum and to gain feedback from the staff. Lessons will be taught by BCSD mental health therapist Laurie Strand.
“We decided this would be a great opportunity to pilot the program that was adopted by the subcommittee charged with looking at curriculum,” Strand said. “After the three sessions, I will gather data from both students and EHSS middle school teachers about moving forward next year by using the full curriculum at WRMS and EHSS.”
