Duluth, MN

A welcome return for DARE in Duluth

Duluth News Tribune - March 15, 2008

Two years ago, on a bright spring evening, hundreds of fifth-graders and their families piled into the Duluth Auditorium.

On stage, then-Police Chief Roger Waller was praising the benefits of DARE — Drug Abuse Resistance Education — and how the program was able to “teach young people to say no to drugs, to resist peer pressure and to find alternatives to drug use.” Then-Mayor Herb Bergson followed, extolling DARE's knack for forging “life-long friendships” between students and police officers, relationships that sometimes helped “kids who were on the edge [get] back on track.”

Despite the flow of glowing acclaim, in the days that followed that graduation ceremony, the DARE program got axed in Duluth. The city could no longer afford it, officials claimed.

“We were so short-staffed, we couldn't do it anymore,” Waller recalled this spring. “It was a joint decision made with the [Duluth school] superintendent, with input from the principals. We had to cut back somewhere.”

Duluth's financial woes are as well-documented as the city's inability to plow streets as quickly as it used to. Cuts constantly seem necessary. But DARE? Isn't that a little like turning up the radio to drown out a clunking sound from the engine? While it's easy to ignore a symptom, a full-blown emergency down the road can be far more costly.

Like an oil change or tune-up, DARE is proven preventive maintenance. Hard numbers are tough to come by. Just how do you count the hundreds of thousands of Duluth kids or the millions of American, Canadian and other youths who've made good choices over the years and who didn't get into trouble because they remembered what that cop said who visited their classroom once a week for a year?

A survey conducted last year by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — the latest of countless studies to gauge DARE's effectiveness — found nearly unanimous support for a program born in 1982 on the mean streets of Los Angeles. In 221 schools:

* 93 percent of students agreed they learned new ways to make good and informed decisions about using — or not using — alcohol, tobacco or drugs.

* 96 percent of parents felt DARE had positive effects on their children's attitudes and decision-making.

* 97 percent of teachers felt good about having officers in their classrooms.

* 96 percent of principals felt the program fully met their_professional educational standards and practices.

That's all A's. And all good arguments for bringing DARE back to Duluth.

Which was precisely what new Police Chief Gordon Ramsay did this school year.

“While our staffing today is not much different than it was in 2006 when DARE was cut, I am committed to_community-based programs that focus on prevention and youth,” Ramsay told me in an e-mail. “I feel strongly we need to do all we can to educate and prevent problems before they occur.”

“It was not a matter of additional money,” he said. “It [was] about prioritizing.”

Those priorities included leaving open several of the police department's sergeant positions to allow for more community officers — including their return, after three-year absences, to Duluth's Lakeside, Lester Park and Woodland neighborhoods. It included the coming return of the department's juvenile bureau, dormant for budgetary reasons since 2003.

(The bureau investigates wrongdoing involving suspects younger than 18, a demographic “responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime,” Ramsay said. The bureau hopes to turn that trend.)

And they included bringing back DARE, a $75,000-a-year commitment to cover an officer's salary and benefits. Most supplies, T-shirts for the kids and other expenses are paid for by Twin Ports DARE, a grassroots nonprofit led by a local business owner.

“We heard from a lot of people the DARE program was important, and I personally felt it was important,” said Deputy Police Chief John Beyer, one of the original instructors when DARE started in Duluth in 1992. “I look at my days of doing DARE as the highlight of my career. I knew I was making a difference.”

Duluth's DARE program is a one-officer show this year. Bob Olson “is the lone ranger,” Beyer said. He's bouncing between schools now. In the summer he'll patrol the Lakewalk on a mountain bike.

DARE is being taught in Duluth this year in sixth grade rather than fifth. The change was wisely made so a whole class of students wouldn't be missed by last year's hiatus.

Statewide in Minnesota, DARE is taught to 73,196 students by 183 police departments and sheriff's offices — at last count. The way it's taught has been updated nine times over the years and today includes not only education about alcohol and general drug use, but also about bullying, the dangers of methamphetamine, the growing abuse of prescription drugs found in homes, Internet safety and gang violence.

“We're continuing to build as times change,” said Kathi Ackerman, the executive director of Minnesota DARE. “The focus includes life skills and decision-_making nowadays, too.”

In Duluth, the focus again includes making sure there are DARE graduations held at the DECC, whether the spring evenings are bright or not.

Waller said the plan all along was to bring the program back this year in the sixth grade because it “builds strong relationships between kids and uniformed police officers. There's nothing better than that program,” he said.