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By Kim Bates
July 27, 2005
BOWLING GREEN - Freshmen arriving at Bowling Green State University next month will be presented with a new task: Each will be asked to complete an online alcohol prevention program over the next semester.
Known as AlcoholEdu, the program - which protects students' identities from university officials - will be offered in hopes of motivating changes about student drinking.
Created and administered by a Needham, Mass., company, the course is being offered for the first time at BGSU as a result of a $300,000 federal grant.
In addition to first-year students, organizers will ask other undergraduates - athletes and fraternity and sorority members who fall into the highest-risk categories for drinking - to complete the program.
Organizers know they'll need to look at creative ways for making sure students finish the online course.
"The data suggests that for our athletes and Greeks, particularly if you were to look at the binge-drinking issues, they have more of an issue than the general undergraduate population," said Ron Binder, director of Greek affairs at BGSU.
Specifically, he said national figures show the binge drinking level for a typical undergraduate is about 45 percent, a figure that jumps by at least 20 percent or more for athletes and students affiliated with fraternities and sororities.
At BGSU, 56 percent of students most recently surveyed in a biennial American College Health Association assessment fell into a category of "high-risk drinking," which means they consumed five or more alcoholic drinks in a sitting more than once in a two-week period.
In addition to the online prevention program, the two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education will allow program organizers to reach out to several area entities to help them deal with the issue of alcohol poisoning.
Those groups include the university's Student Health Service, the Wood County Hospital's emergency room staff as well as campus police, city police, and others.
Members of the entities are expected to be trained to use the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism guidelines when encountering students with alcohol problems, said Barbara Hoffman, coordinator of the grant project and health promotion coordinator at BGSU's Wellness Connection.
The hospital's emergency room employees have university pamphlets for students and can refer those who ask to counseling-type offerings at BGSU.
David Caprara, a nurse and director of the emergency department at the hospital, favors new programs aimed at better educating students about alcohol.
"I think the No. 1 thing is just having a better understanding that it can be dangerous," Mr. Caprara said.
"Unfortunately, it [typically] takes a bad situation for it to hit home," he said.
BGSU received the grant based on a proposal from Terry Rentner, an associate professor of journalism and director of the grant project, and Ms. Hoffman.
In addition to seeing changes in attitudes and behaviors and sharing their findings with institutions elsewhere, Ms. Rentner said they hope to document a reduction in the number of students who are considered high-risk drinkers.
The BGSU figure has been dropping by an average of 2.5 percent every two years, which Ms. Rentner believes is connected to other educational efforts in place at BGSU for years.
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