Five minutes of class were left when officer Brian Johnson of the Wright County Sheriff’s Department pulled out the DARE box. Named for the 20-year-old program that teaches drug abuse resistance education in the school, the box is a tool fifth-graders at Annandale Middle School use to voice hard questions. The concern Tuesday, Nov. 4, written on a folded piece of paper, was whether it was acceptable to support a favorite NASCAR driver who was sponsored by a beer company. Part of DARE’s challenge, said Johnson, is untangling the mass of mixed messages kids receive about drugs and violence. He blamed television and other media outlets for removing the blinders of happily-ever-after at a younger age. “Our kids grow up a lot faster than they did 20 years ago,” he said. “They see a lot more of the world on TV, and they see how it has become an accepted part of our society.” After carefully considering his answer, Johnson told the class that alcohol isn’t always negative. He used the example of having a glass of wine with dinner. The occasional drink is OK; it’s when kids start using alcohol or when it is abused by adults that it becomes dangerous, he said. Last summer, DARE created a new curriculum for the 21st century child that Johnson said gets right down to the heart of what kids need to know to live productive, drug- and violence-free lives. The new curriculum, which was implemented for the first time in classrooms in September, focuses not only on drugs but on peer pressure, stress and the kind of verbal bullying that has been linked to violence such as school shootings. “People think DARE is all about drugs, but it’s not,” Johnson said. “A big part of DARE is about teaching kids to make the right decision.” Annandale has had the DARE program in its schools for nearly 10 years. This is Johnson’s second year as an instructor in the district. In Annandale, the program is funded by a combination of sources including donations from businesses and money from the Wright County Sheriff’s Department, with the largest amount coming from the Annandale Lions and the Fire Fighters Relief Association. While other communities across the state have made cutbacks to the program or have shut it down altogether, Annandale has always made DARE a top priority. That echos Wright County Sheriff Gary Miller’s philosophy. “Even if people criticize the program and say it doesn’t work, at least we are doing something and doing something is better than doing nothing. Until we find something better, we will use this,” Johnson said, paraphrasing a speech Miller often uses at DARE graduations. Since 1983 when the Los Angeles Police Department created the first DARE class, communities around the world have supported the idea that doing something is better than doing nothing. Today the program is in 80 percent of United States school districts and more than 54 countries around the world. “The curriculum has been proven to work,” Johnson said. In 2000, an evaluation done on seventh- graders by the University of Minnesota showed that students involved in DARE displayed a significantly lower rate of alcohol use. The original DARE curriculum called for a 17-week program. The new curriculum was cut back to nine weeks, though Johnson says none of the original message has been lost. Johnson visits Annandale two days a week for six one-hour classes. The Annandale program focuses mainly on fifth- and sixth-grade students, though DARE offers curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade. “Statistics show that pressure to do drugs peaks at the seventh and eighth grades,” Johnson said. “At the fifth- and sixth-grade level kids are becoming more aware of drugs. At this age we are catching them right before they hit that peak.” After the sixth grade, regular public school health classes pick up much of the curriculum DARE would focus on. In Johnson’s classes, team activities are a big part of the sessions. “We discuss, in teams, situations we find in our workbooks,” he said. “We discuss and make choices then review and analyze our decisions to see if we made the right choice.” Workbook situations focus primarily on peer pressure in which a friend is trying to convince another to drink, use drugs or smoke. The students also think a lot about bullying and the consequences of their actions, he said. Johnson, who is also a school resource officer in the Dassel-Cokato School District, had to complete two weeks of rigorous training at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension DARE Training Center. The training focuses on educating officers in child development, classroom management, teaching techniques and communications skills. Last fall, Johnson went through another series of training exercises to learn the new curriculum. “I don’t feel the new curriculum loses anything,” Johnson said. “It just updates some things for a more mature audience. The message of DARE is the same.”
