Jun 15, 2016 4 min read

All five Greene County school districts will implement the same drug-prevention curriculum this coming school year for students in grades 3 to 9.

The collaboration to develop a countywide program to prevent student drug abuse was in the works for months, according to Christine Gardner, court assistant for community prevention and education, and Philomena Blaney, member of Coalition for a Brighter Greene.

“The five districts agreed to this three months ago,” said Blaney of Morgan Township. “It’s still a work in progress. Once people fall victim to substance abuse, then it’s a real challenging road.”

The adopted seven-year program will start in third grade and follow students through ninth grade. Students within those grades will take the prevention course once per week for a quarter of each school year, Blaney said.

She said the idea to have one curriculum across the county was derived from a town hall meeting on the heroin epidemic held at Greene County Courthouse in October. From there, Blaney, Gardner, all five superintendents and some curriculum directors got together for four to six weeks to research and decide on a curriculum.

“The school districts are very challenged right now, but they were open to this idea because they understand the depths of the problem,” Blaney said. “We came together to map out where the greatest sense of urgency was. It was something that needed to happen quickly.”

Blaney said the group settled on a curriculum called Life Skills Training, by a New York company called Botvin.

She said for the first year, the group hopes to secure enough funding for the program through private donations from corporations and foundations. So far, they have one-third of the funding.

By next year, all districts should receive data from the 2015 Pennsylvania Youth Survey, which would make them eligible for state funding for the drug-prevention curriculum at the middle school level.

“It’s about changing attitudes and habits,” Blaney said. “We know that children are getting into and being exposed to drugs at a younger age, whether from peers or their parents.”

She said within the past year, two Greene County fourth-graders went through the juvenile court system for having illegal substances in their system.

“And there may be more,” she said. “I’m very passionate about getting to children at a young age and speaking to them about this issue. It’s the best chance we have of landing in a better place down the road.”

She said the curriculum for the elementary-age students focuses more on the importance of taking care of your body, making healthy choices, building positive friendships and avoiding peer pressure.

“It’s not like we’re going to be showing third-graders pictures of people who have done crystal meth for 20 years to try to scare the socks off of them,” Blaney said.

West Greene Superintendent Thelma Szarell said all the superintendents agreed drug prevention and education needs to happen at a much younger age. She said at West Greene, they’ve had a problem with recent graduates with drug abuse problems influencing current students who may be younger siblings, friends, relatives or neighbors.

“In recent years, we’ve tried to target high school students and have left out the younger students,” she said. “But we’re trying to do whatever we can to improve on what we’ve been doing, because it’s such a huge challenge. It’s been sad.”

She said she hopes this curriculum will work better than any prevention program they’ve used in the past because it will be treated like an actual course rather than an extracurricular activity to tack on at the end of the day.

Each district will select teachers and counselors, dependent on grade levels, who will be trained for the curriculum in August before school starts.

Szarell said the districts were glad to adopt a flexible program that will have common language through the districts, in case students move from one to another.

“It’s essential that everybody work together on this because it’s affected everybody,” she said. “Every one of us has been affected in some way. It takes our whole county to try to combat this.”