Cass County DARE Program
The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program is going high-tech, interactive, and decision-model-based. Gleaming with the latest in prevention science and teaching techniques, D.A.R.E. is reinventing itself as part of a major national research study that promises to help teachers and administrators cope with ever-evolving federal prevention program requirements and the thorny issues of school violence, budget cuts, and terrorism.
Gone is the old-style approach to prevention in which an officer stands behind a podium and lectures students in straight rows. New D.A.R.E. officers are trained as "coaches" to support kids who are using research-based refusal strategies in high-stakes peer-pressure environments.
The New D.A.R.E. curriculum is in its fourth year of a massive five-year national research effort. The new D.A.R.E. curricula designed to blend the latest in effective prevention science with the nation's largest prevention delivery network-D.A.R.E.
Dr. Herb Kleber, internationally recognized substance abuse expert and Chairman of D.A.R.E. America's Scientific Advisory Board, praises the ambitious scope of the New D.A.R.E. curriculum study, "D.A.R.E has had the highest dissemination for decades of any school-based drug prevention program. It reaches 26 million children a year in 75 percent of all school districts and is admired by children and parents alike," says Kleber, "The generous support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the talent of the University of Akron group have made it possible to combine this acceptance with state-of-the-art- teaching and content to make D.A.R.E. not only the most popular, but the best."
With research showing that adolescents, in particular, need to be involved in the learning process, experts shifted the focus in the new D.A.R.E. curriculum to include officer-facilitated work, discussion groups, and role-playing sessions.