Post by slt on Nov 22, 2009 9:11:06 GMT -5
www.suburbanchicagonews.com/beaconnews/news/1898147,Aurora-police-pull-DARE-GREAT_AU112209.article#
November 22, 2009
By PAUL DAILING pdailing@scn1.com
The letter came in mid-September.
Signed by Aurora Police Chief Greg Thomas and starting with "Dear School Administrator," the message was short but succinct — the police department was cutting all funding to DARE and GREAT programs at all Aurora schools.
Districts can have schools in different police jurisdictions. Different programs exist at middle and high school levels.
The programs, which brought police officers into 46 Aurora elementary and middle schools to talk about drugs and gangs were costing the department more than $100,000 a year to run, the letter said. With the city facing a $19 million budget shortfall, the department had been told to cut costs.
"Despite their value, the DARE and GREAT programs are cost-prohibitive and will no longer be provided beginning this 2009-2010 school year," Thomas wrote. "This is a hard decision for us to make, but it is an economic necessity."
But what really is that value?
Both the schools and the police praise the programs for bringing together cops and kids in a non-confrontational setting. But numerous studies have shown that Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) doesn't keep kids off drugs.
In fact, a 2007 study published in "Perspectives in Psychological Science" suggested DARE could actually have negative effects by making drugs like alcohol look more acceptable compared to drugs like cocaine and heroin.
In the past, fifth-graders took part in the DARE program eight weeks of the year in both the East and West Aurora school districts.
Although a 2004 National Institute of Justice study found Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) didn't keep kids out of gangs, a wholesale revision to the program has been showing good results. Even the author of the negative 2004 study said his current study of the revised GREAT shows the program is working and working well.
Aurora seventh-graders got this program eight weeks of the year.
"There are so few programs out there that deal with youth violence and gang membership that look like they have any effect, I would not be cutting it," researcher Finn-Aage Esbensen said when told about Aurora cutting GREAT. "But I don't have to make those financial decisions either."
So research says one program works. The more expensive program doesn't.
Too good for DARE?
The notion that DARE doesn't work isn't a counter-culture, anti-authority stance, unless you consider the U.S. Surgeon General, the U.S. Department of Education, the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences and the Kane County sheriff anti-authority.
When asked if DARE works, Kane Sheriff Pat Perez simply said, "It doesn't."
"That's why we went to Too Good For Drugs," he said, referring to the anti-drug program the sheriff's office has used for the last five or so years.
"It's nowhere near as finance intensive or labor intensive as DARE was and we're getting good results."
The money burden is entirely on the cops in this case. By law, school districts can't pay for DARE unless they get a special waiver from the state, U.S. Department of Education spokesman Jo Ann Webb said.
"DARE can't be automatically funded, as there isn't any credible evidence that the program works," Webb said.
Any waiver will only let the school collect evaluation data on the program, not fund it year after year, she said.
Like Kane County, St. Charles and Naperville have done, Aurora was looking at a switch from DARE to Too Good For Drugs.
Then the economy tanked and the department couldn't afford either.
"The decision to switch over from DARE to Too Good For Drugs didn't have to be made because of the economic situation," Chief Thomas said.
There are other options. Geneva dropped all DARE five or six years ago, moving to Project ALERT at the middle schools. The Oswego School District created its own officer-taught grade-school anti-drug program, called Facing All Choices Together, or FACT.
But DARE is a popular program — since 1983 it spread from Los Angeles to 75 percent of America's schools, plus schools in 42 other countries.
Even the Kane County Sheriff's Department, which ditched DARE years ago, shows off the old DARE cruiser at parades. Aurora has two DARE cars, both seized from drug dealers.
The DARE and GREAT programs cost the Aurora Police Department $106,000 a year.
"Almost all of it is overtime," Thomas said of the price tag.
In 2008, salaries and benefits made up $51.1 million of the department's $55.6 million budget. It had budgeted $600,000 to pay for overtime.
But overtime is an unpredictable — and mostly unavoidable — cost. By mid-October of 2008, the department had already blown its overtime budget by more than $16,000.
In 2007, the department ended up paying more than $845,000 in overtime.
What about the kids?
The trouble with losing police support for DARE and GREAT is that officers, not teachers, run the program, East Aurora School District spokesman Clayton Muhammad said.
In short: no cops, no DARE.
"It's not like the school district can incorporate that into our curriculum," Muhammad said.
Both the East and West Aurora districts provide drug and gang education programs to their students. At West, the major program for the grade-school level is Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS.
"It's research-based and it works," West Aurora School District spokesman Mike Chapin said.
"I think all of our elementary schools have implemented it, and the other schools are in various stages from implementation to installation."
While East has a number of programs aimed at both problems, Muhammad said DARE and GREAT are losses aside from the drugs and gangs.
"To me, the direct loss is that now we remove those community figures in the classroom," East Aurora School District spokesman Clayton Muhammad said. "They can see the police officers as their positive role models, their mentors, their friends."
The middle schools and the high school have in-school resource officers. Muhammad is also working on other ways to bring officers into the grade schools, including bringing in K9 units, as they recently did during the Week Without Violence campaign, and bringing in cops for career day.
Muhammad also praised the timing of GREAT, saying that the program for seventh-graders comes at the time 12- and 13-year-olds are targeted for gang recruitment.
But DARE costs more.
Although DARE supplies alone cost $20,000, compared to the $5,000 Aurora budgeted this year for GREAT supplies, that's due to the greater number of grade schools, said Sgt. Doug Sibon, who ran both programs for Aurora police.
The actual per-student costs are pretty even, he said.
"For the most part, GREAT had the officer time, they had books and they had T-shirts. For DARE they also had the graduation certificates and the medals (for essay contest winners)," he said.
Aurora has been trimming DARE and GREAT costs for a while, Sibon said.
Cutting back on non-essential stickers and bookmarks and finding a local supplier for the T-shirts helped some, but not enough to offset the rising cost.
"As the cost for the programs kept going higher and higher, we had to make some choices about the essentials of the programs," he said.
DARE itself wasn't why costs were rising, Sibon said. As officers got their yearly cost-of-living raises, overtime went higher. The problem is mainly that Aurora is a growing city.
"The population of the city goes up so you have more fifth- and sixth-graders who need the program," Sibon said.
The department also has $12,000 budgeted for DARE/GREAT training and $600 for each officer's DARE association dues, although Sibon said those funds haven't been used for those purposes in years. They're thrown elsewhere into the programs.
Determining results
Aurora has joined Illinois cities like Downers Grove and Loves Park on a list of police departments cutting prevention programs to make budget.
Closer to home, Montgomery police are looking at canceling the DARE program for the 2010-11 school year.
"Right now, I can't really say if it's going to be a go or not because of the economy," Detective Jeff Ricedorf of the Montgomery Police Department said, adding that the department would find other ways to get the anti-drug message, if not the program, to the fifth-graders.
"I think what you're seeing is that, across the board, a lot of departments will go to their prevention programs first when dealing with budget issues," said GREAT Regional Administrator Lt. Jason Melby of the La Crosse Police Department in Wisconsin. "The number of arrests is a tangible number … but it's hard to put a figure on how many kids you will affect by having a prevention program."
Melby is confident departments will return to GREAT once the economy improves.
"You see departments come back to prevention programs because there is a demand for it. The public does like a well-rounded police department," he said.
But state DARE coordinator John Wyant isn't as sure.
"That's going to be the real challenge, getting back in some of these communities where we've been for years and years," Wyant said.
November 22, 2009
By PAUL DAILING pdailing@scn1.com
The letter came in mid-September.
Signed by Aurora Police Chief Greg Thomas and starting with "Dear School Administrator," the message was short but succinct — the police department was cutting all funding to DARE and GREAT programs at all Aurora schools.
Districts can have schools in different police jurisdictions. Different programs exist at middle and high school levels.
The programs, which brought police officers into 46 Aurora elementary and middle schools to talk about drugs and gangs were costing the department more than $100,000 a year to run, the letter said. With the city facing a $19 million budget shortfall, the department had been told to cut costs.
"Despite their value, the DARE and GREAT programs are cost-prohibitive and will no longer be provided beginning this 2009-2010 school year," Thomas wrote. "This is a hard decision for us to make, but it is an economic necessity."
But what really is that value?
Both the schools and the police praise the programs for bringing together cops and kids in a non-confrontational setting. But numerous studies have shown that Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) doesn't keep kids off drugs.
In fact, a 2007 study published in "Perspectives in Psychological Science" suggested DARE could actually have negative effects by making drugs like alcohol look more acceptable compared to drugs like cocaine and heroin.
In the past, fifth-graders took part in the DARE program eight weeks of the year in both the East and West Aurora school districts.
Although a 2004 National Institute of Justice study found Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) didn't keep kids out of gangs, a wholesale revision to the program has been showing good results. Even the author of the negative 2004 study said his current study of the revised GREAT shows the program is working and working well.
Aurora seventh-graders got this program eight weeks of the year.
"There are so few programs out there that deal with youth violence and gang membership that look like they have any effect, I would not be cutting it," researcher Finn-Aage Esbensen said when told about Aurora cutting GREAT. "But I don't have to make those financial decisions either."
So research says one program works. The more expensive program doesn't.
Too good for DARE?
The notion that DARE doesn't work isn't a counter-culture, anti-authority stance, unless you consider the U.S. Surgeon General, the U.S. Department of Education, the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences and the Kane County sheriff anti-authority.
When asked if DARE works, Kane Sheriff Pat Perez simply said, "It doesn't."
"That's why we went to Too Good For Drugs," he said, referring to the anti-drug program the sheriff's office has used for the last five or so years.
"It's nowhere near as finance intensive or labor intensive as DARE was and we're getting good results."
The money burden is entirely on the cops in this case. By law, school districts can't pay for DARE unless they get a special waiver from the state, U.S. Department of Education spokesman Jo Ann Webb said.
"DARE can't be automatically funded, as there isn't any credible evidence that the program works," Webb said.
Any waiver will only let the school collect evaluation data on the program, not fund it year after year, she said.
Like Kane County, St. Charles and Naperville have done, Aurora was looking at a switch from DARE to Too Good For Drugs.
Then the economy tanked and the department couldn't afford either.
"The decision to switch over from DARE to Too Good For Drugs didn't have to be made because of the economic situation," Chief Thomas said.
There are other options. Geneva dropped all DARE five or six years ago, moving to Project ALERT at the middle schools. The Oswego School District created its own officer-taught grade-school anti-drug program, called Facing All Choices Together, or FACT.
But DARE is a popular program — since 1983 it spread from Los Angeles to 75 percent of America's schools, plus schools in 42 other countries.
Even the Kane County Sheriff's Department, which ditched DARE years ago, shows off the old DARE cruiser at parades. Aurora has two DARE cars, both seized from drug dealers.
The DARE and GREAT programs cost the Aurora Police Department $106,000 a year.
"Almost all of it is overtime," Thomas said of the price tag.
In 2008, salaries and benefits made up $51.1 million of the department's $55.6 million budget. It had budgeted $600,000 to pay for overtime.
But overtime is an unpredictable — and mostly unavoidable — cost. By mid-October of 2008, the department had already blown its overtime budget by more than $16,000.
In 2007, the department ended up paying more than $845,000 in overtime.
What about the kids?
The trouble with losing police support for DARE and GREAT is that officers, not teachers, run the program, East Aurora School District spokesman Clayton Muhammad said.
In short: no cops, no DARE.
"It's not like the school district can incorporate that into our curriculum," Muhammad said.
Both the East and West Aurora districts provide drug and gang education programs to their students. At West, the major program for the grade-school level is Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS.
"It's research-based and it works," West Aurora School District spokesman Mike Chapin said.
"I think all of our elementary schools have implemented it, and the other schools are in various stages from implementation to installation."
While East has a number of programs aimed at both problems, Muhammad said DARE and GREAT are losses aside from the drugs and gangs.
"To me, the direct loss is that now we remove those community figures in the classroom," East Aurora School District spokesman Clayton Muhammad said. "They can see the police officers as their positive role models, their mentors, their friends."
The middle schools and the high school have in-school resource officers. Muhammad is also working on other ways to bring officers into the grade schools, including bringing in K9 units, as they recently did during the Week Without Violence campaign, and bringing in cops for career day.
Muhammad also praised the timing of GREAT, saying that the program for seventh-graders comes at the time 12- and 13-year-olds are targeted for gang recruitment.
But DARE costs more.
Although DARE supplies alone cost $20,000, compared to the $5,000 Aurora budgeted this year for GREAT supplies, that's due to the greater number of grade schools, said Sgt. Doug Sibon, who ran both programs for Aurora police.
The actual per-student costs are pretty even, he said.
"For the most part, GREAT had the officer time, they had books and they had T-shirts. For DARE they also had the graduation certificates and the medals (for essay contest winners)," he said.
Aurora has been trimming DARE and GREAT costs for a while, Sibon said.
Cutting back on non-essential stickers and bookmarks and finding a local supplier for the T-shirts helped some, but not enough to offset the rising cost.
"As the cost for the programs kept going higher and higher, we had to make some choices about the essentials of the programs," he said.
DARE itself wasn't why costs were rising, Sibon said. As officers got their yearly cost-of-living raises, overtime went higher. The problem is mainly that Aurora is a growing city.
"The population of the city goes up so you have more fifth- and sixth-graders who need the program," Sibon said.
The department also has $12,000 budgeted for DARE/GREAT training and $600 for each officer's DARE association dues, although Sibon said those funds haven't been used for those purposes in years. They're thrown elsewhere into the programs.
Determining results
Aurora has joined Illinois cities like Downers Grove and Loves Park on a list of police departments cutting prevention programs to make budget.
Closer to home, Montgomery police are looking at canceling the DARE program for the 2010-11 school year.
"Right now, I can't really say if it's going to be a go or not because of the economy," Detective Jeff Ricedorf of the Montgomery Police Department said, adding that the department would find other ways to get the anti-drug message, if not the program, to the fifth-graders.
"I think what you're seeing is that, across the board, a lot of departments will go to their prevention programs first when dealing with budget issues," said GREAT Regional Administrator Lt. Jason Melby of the La Crosse Police Department in Wisconsin. "The number of arrests is a tangible number … but it's hard to put a figure on how many kids you will affect by having a prevention program."
Melby is confident departments will return to GREAT once the economy improves.
"You see departments come back to prevention programs because there is a demand for it. The public does like a well-rounded police department," he said.
But state DARE coordinator John Wyant isn't as sure.
"That's going to be the real challenge, getting back in some of these communities where we've been for years and years," Wyant said.
