“Sometimes the parents just think that their kid’s know, well a lot of kids don’t,” said Brian Cosgrove, an officer at the West Seneca Police Ddepartment.
Cosgrove has been teaching drug and alcohol awareness with the Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE, program for seven years. DARE has been educating school children on the dangers of drugs and alcohol since it was started in Los Angeles in 1983. It has since spread to more than 43 countries around the world, including 75 percent of our nation’s school districts. Cosgrove specializes in teaching fifth grade elementary school students.
“Middle school kids are in that phase of maturity where they think their parents don’t know what they are talking about and teachers don’t know what they are talking about. It’s tougher with middle school kids to get your point across. Fifth graders are still impressionable, they’re 10 years old and they still believe in us and believe in what we have to say,” said Cosgrove. The current DARE curriculum consists of 10 lessons. The first few lessons concentrate on the harmful effects of gateway drugs, including tobacco, alcohol and marijuana.
“We focus on marijuana a lot because it’s a gateway drug. You use marijuana, you’re more likely to branch off and try other things,” said Cosgrove. Lesson five focuses on alerting the students about how advertisers try to market their products to children.
“The advertising companies try to tempt you to use their product and make it seem really good. I used to like to talk about that, however cigarette ads are pretty hard to find nowadays,” said Cosgrove.
Lessons six through nine are all about how to handle different peer pressure situations that the students may encounter in the next few years.
“The two parts are teaching the harmful effects and then using that information to make good choices and to be confident when you’re making those choices. Get out of different peer pressure situations,” said Cosgrove.
Lesson 10 is the graduation, in which students receive their diplomas and present their essays on what they learned to an audience of family and friends.
However, this current DARE curriculum is about to be a thing of the past. In an attempt to keep up with the times, the program has begun to evolve.
“It’s a totally new curriculum which is going to start this fall. It focuses a lot more on friendships and getting bonds with kids with good qualities. It cuts down heavily on advertising and a lot of things are different as far as time spent on certain topics. We spent a whole lesson on the health effects of using tobacco and now it’s not, it’s less, so we’ll see how it goes,” said Cosgrove.
Cosgrove just completed his training in the new system with the state Department of Criminal Justice Services, as did all of other DARE officers.
“Hopefully if they start out with a good, stable foundation, they will make good choices right away and by the time they get to high school the foundations are already in place and no matter how the cycle of drug use goes they are not going to be affected by it, I hope,” said Cosgrove.
Although the new curriculum is more up to date, Cosgrove is not entirely convinced.
“They tell us that it should be a good curriculum but until I get in the classroom and use it, I don’t know if it’s the greatest… I just don’t know,” said Cosgrove.
Due to financial problems, many school districts have begun to make cutbacks and programs like DARE are often among the first to go. There are even a few school districts that have done away with the program entirely.
“The cost is minimal compared to what you get out of it. Our town, our chief, the school board and the super intendant are all super supportive of the DARE program, so for the foreseeable future in West Seneca the DARE program isn’t going anywhere,” said Cosgrove.
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