By Nate Jones
Staff Writer
If there is a war on drugs, the national Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program could be considered a drug-free boot camp for kids. About 275 students from the Wentworth Intermediate’s fifth grade class graduated Tuesday from the nine-week program.
D.A.R.E has come a long way since its inception in 1983, and continues to evolve as children of all ages are faced with different situations, said Joe Giacomantonio, the community resource officer for Scarborough and D.A.R.E. coordinator for the state. D.A.R.E. was redesigned four years ago to focus on developing certain decision-making skills in its students, he said.
“We try to teach kids how to say no to their friends and avoid peer pressure,” Giacomantonio said.
The program is available to students from kindergarten through high school, and begins with a few officer visits into kindergarten classrooms, where they review basic safety measures “such as traffic and chemical safety,” Giacomantonio said.
Fifth and sixth grade programs specifically encourage students to stay away from drugs such as marijuana, tobacco and inhalants. The program is not required for students at the Wentworth school, although Giacomantonio said he hasn’t ever had a student opt out of the course.
The program, which students take in addition to their regular courses,  and is often incorporated into the school’s health curriculum, as is the case in Scarborough schools.
Decision making skills developed during the fifth and sixth grade programs are reinforced through junior high, Giacomantonio said. By the time students reach high school, they learn more specifics about the effects of drugs such as methamphetamines or other likely “drugs of choice,” Giacomantonio said.
Giacomantonio said the Scarborough program has had great support from parents and educators, although nationally the program “has had its peaks and valleys.” People are still getting used to seeing police officers in schools, and education has become a large part of community policing, he said.
Although the D.A.R.E. program doesn’t make efforts to measure its own success, according to a study provided by Giacomantonio published by the Journal of the National Medical Association in 2002, “students that completed the D.A.R.E. program were five times less likely to start smoking compared to youngsters who did not participate in D.A.R.E.”
The study is one amongst many focused on the effectiveness of the D.A.R.E. program, many of which found the program is not as successful as educators may hope.
“They know what they’re doing wrong, and they still decided to make those decisions,” Giacomantonio said of the D.A.R.E. students who do take up abusive habits. “The key is to reinforce everything they learn. It’s like learning a language; if you don’t speak it for a while, it gets harder and harder to remember how.”
Giacomantonio said one of the new aspects of the program is a “D.A.R.E. box” that officers bring to every class.
“It’s a direct pipeline for students,” Giacomantonio said. “Students who wouldn’t normally come forward feel secure communicating with officers through the ‘D.A.R.E. box,’ which they can drop a letter about anything in at any time.”
As part of the course each student is required to compose a personal essay about his or her D.A.R.E. experience. Giacomantonio said he and School Resource Officer Bob Moore are often surprised at the high quality of the essays.
Graduating D.A.R.E. students were each awarded a certificate and a T-shirt for completing the course. Six students were selected to read their essays at Tuesday’s assembly, which also included singing and dancing by several students.
The students had mixed feelings about the completion of the course. Jeri Conley said she was glad to be graduating the program since she felt she was ready to use the lessons she learned during the nine weeks. Her classmate Ashley Briggs said she was going to miss Moore and the D.A.R.E. class activities.
Fifth grader Lyndsey Anderson said she was surprised to learn about the 200 different poisons in cigarettes.
Braden Kane, whose grandfather originally brought the D.A.R.E. program to Scarborough as Chief of Police, said he had enjoyed the different role-playing “skits” that they had participated in.
“We were supposed to say certain things but usually couldn’t stop laughing,” Briggs said.
All four students said they had already used their education at home; Briggs convinced her grandmother to quit smoking and Conley said she sings her mother an anti-smoking song whenever she lights a cigarette. Kane and Anderson both said they also had relatives who smoked, and understood how difficult it can be to quit.