Judith Mezey
Assistant Director for Community Based Programs for Student Assistance Services Corp.
Read Judith's biography
In a typical American town, a school survey indicates that youth alcohol use is a problem and that students are buying alcohol at local establishments and then drinking at friends’ homes. The coalition hosts a parent meeting at the school on teen drinking and organizes an educational program for local merchants.
The police department conducts compliance checks in stores licensed to sell alcohol. Community leaders, including students, hold a press conference acknowledging the stores that refused sales to minors. The school features this press conference in their newsletter. This example highlights many of the benefits and key elements to schools and coalitions partnering for prevention efforts.
Working together, schools and coalitions can achieve strong prevention success. A key to the collaboration is the belief that underage drinking is no-one’s fault but everyone’s responsibility. This philosophy discourages unproductive “finger pointing,” and promotes true collaboration.
Coalitions can strongly benefit high school prevention efforts in a number of ways. They can create a groundswell of community support for strong school norms and policies that discourage use. Coalitions can help attract publicity and resources for school efforts and provide access to best practices in prevention science through their contact with researchers in the field. Coalition members can act as volunteers for school activities and echo the prevention messages that schools send to create a seamless fabric of prevention in the community. Coalitions can provide training and opportunities for alcohol-free student leaders to spread their message beyond the school’s walls.
Similarly, schools have much to offer coalitions. With easy access to the greatest number of students, schools can support data gathering efforts to provide baseline numbers and benchmark prevention results. Schools are a prime area for offering services to students and their families including prevention counseling, outreach, support groups, and educational programming in appropriate classroom settings. Many students are making healthy decisions, and schools play a key role in amplifying the voices of these students so that they can be heard over the pro-drinking messages that pervade youth culture. Schools can also link these youth with coalitions – this gives coalitions a strong youth voice and also offers student leaders a chance to contribute in a stronger way in their community. Schools are also perfectly situated to educate parents and faculty about their roles in keeping youth safe and alcohol-free.
Schools can and should also create policies and procedures that support no-use messages such as scheduling proms during the week or before a mandatory graduation rehearsal to reduce post-prom parties or mandatory education for coaches, student athletes and their parents on the safety aspects of alcohol and athletics. Schools can also promote culture change through social marketing such as establishing certain months or weeks for school wide prevention activities (such as Children of Alcoholics Week) and providing prevention materials on school websites and in newsletters. Coalitions can create the public will to support these policies and by provide content and materials for the social marketing strategies.
Underage drinking is a tenacious and complex problem that requires a sustained and coordinated approach that includes a strong school-coalition partnership.
Tragically, a sophomore girl died of a cocaine overdose in a neighboring school suburban district. As a result, a former school board member who attended the same church as this young girl asked our school superintendent, "What is our school district going to do to make sure this never happens in our district?"
After some thought it became clear to him that the first major challenge was to get acceptance that this was a regional issue bigger than any one school district. Therefore on October 17, 2002 our school district introduced the concept of the Northern Area Alliance Against Highly Addictive Drugs to a joint meeting of school and community leaders representing twelve school districts in Western Pennsylvania. As a result of this meeting, the "Alliance" group asked school district superintendents to ask their school boards to pass a resolution acknowledging that drug use was a regional threat to our youth and to make a commitment to work together with other districts.
Our district superintendent agreed to provide administrative support including seeking funding to develop the organization. In 2004, the Alliance was incorporated as a non-profit organization and has grown to consist of public, non-public and private schools across our region. Our goals include "Reduce the number of overdose and related deaths of persons under the age of 25” and "Increase community networking."
Of particular note, was the early acknowledgement that the organization must use "new" and "innovative" strategies to manage a wide range of organizations and prevention programs, i.e., use the networking power of the Internet. The Alliance web site was developed to be an information clearing house, membership database, and directory of schools, support services, and youth activity organizations.
Currently, parent prevention video programming is available 24/7. We realized that to reach parents we must work through existing parent leadership structures in schools. Our very successful Alliance/PTO partnership video program "Listen," has been conducted throughout the region.
In Alliance programs, we have addressed the concept of "gateway" drugs and emphasized the risk of all drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, to our youth. In one of our video productions, a police officer emphasizes to parents that "beer parties are not beer parties anymore, they're chemical parties."
The Alliance employs a full time Executive Director and part-time outreach specialist. It is financially supported by my school district's administrative support, other regional schools, churches, regional foundations, treatment agencies, fund raising events, individual donations and grants. Please visit http://www.drug-alliance.org to learn more about the Alliance.
The Prevention Council of Roanoke County and Roanoke County Schools have enjoyed a true collaborative partnership over the past ten years. This partnership effort requires building relationships one person at a time, finding those leaders that have a true passion for efforts in prevention and education of underage alcohol use/abuse and the consequences that surround this topic.
Data is of key importance. We are fortunate to have rich data (n=8,000 students) and five years of trend data spanning a ten year period.
Trust, open and honest communication is part of this data piece. As we come to the table, we believe that alcohol or other drugs are NOT school problems, but community problems that can ONLY be solved by local community solutions.
As a community coalition, we support the school system’s Student Assistant Program services now in its 24th year. School policies regarding substance abuse provide a structure for intervening with students who violate the policy. A Saturday substance abuse school, assessments, groups and individual support are available. Prevention programming is highly emphasized with students, parents, and school personnel.
We are proud to say that building “bench strength” through effectively using the Strategic Prevention Framework process has only strengthened this partnership. Our collaboration with the schools also includes as many sectors of the community as possible: youth, parents, grandparents, schools, multi-media, businesses, faith-based, medical community, recovery, colleges, social services ABC agents, Hispanic community, government officials, law enforcement, court services, and technology experts.
Our emphasis that has been critical to strengthening the partnership is youth! We have active prevention clubs in all five high schools, host an annual Regional youth leadership conference, participate in a statewide youth leadership conference and offer opportunities for our youth to be part of the planning and presentation that is made about prevention of substance use. Many times these youth plan the conferences, develop the power points, and assist with implementing environmental strategies. Our experience with developing youth leadership skills challenges adults to listen, participate in their world of multi-media, and sometimes even follow the youth that are leading!
As the community arm for the school system, we can support changing community norms surrounding underage alcohol use through larger environmental strategies. The overall benefit for this partnership is keeping our youth healthy, safe and alive!