School overstepping their right...........

[frawin]

Steve, my wife I were both involved in D.A.R.E. and PDAP when our kids were in school and I never once seen anyone try to get kids to tell anything about what their parents were doing. You must have gotten involved in a bad program. We desperatly need these programs and they do lots of good. It is disturbing to see someone make statements like you did and it is damaging to the programs.

[srkruzich]

The Use of Children as Informants

"Children are asked to submit to D.A.R.E. police officers sensitive written questionnaires that can easily refer to the kids' homes" and that "a D.A.R.E. lesson called 'The Three R's: Recognize, Resist, Report' ... encourages children to tell friends, teachers or police if they find drugs at home."[30]

In addition, "D.A.R.E. officers are encouraged to put a 'D.A.R.E. Box' in every classroom, into which students may drop 'drug information' or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student 'makes a disclosure related to drug use,' the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the 'drug use' was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents."[31]

"In the official D.A.R.E. Implementation Guide, police officers are advised to be alert for signs of children who have relatives who use drugs. D.A.R.E. officers are first and foremost police officers and thus are duty-bound to follow up leads that might come to their attention through inadvertent or indiscreet comments by young children."[32]

As a result, "children sometimes confide the names of people they suspect are illegally using drugs. A mother and father in Caroline County, Maryland, were jailed for 30 days after their daughter informed a police D.A.R.E. instructor that her parents had marijuana plants in their home, according to a story in The Washington Post in January 1993. The Wall Street Journal reported in 1992 that 'In two recent cases in Boston, children who had tipped police stepped out of their homes carrying D.A.R.E. diplomas as police arrived to arrest their parents.' In 1991, 10-year-old Joaquin Herrera of Englewood, Colorado, phoned 911, announced, 'I'm a D.A.R.E. kid' and summoned police to his house to discover a couple of ounces of marijuana hidden in a bookshelf, according to the Rocky Mountain News. The boy sat outside his parents' home in a police patrol car while the police searched the home and arrested the parents. The policeman assigned to the boy's school commended the boy's action."[33]

[srkruzich]

Efficiency

DARE is constantly reevaluating its efficiency and altering its strategies. Since the 1990s, independent studies of the D.A.R.E program have been conducted from selected school populations. These studies reported that D.A.R.E. did not actually decrease drug use among graduates. Some studies even indicated that there was an increased rate of drug use among D.A.R.E. graduates. In 2001, the Surgeon General of the United States placed the D.A.R.E. program in the category of "Does Not Work"[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education#Efficiency

[srkruzich]

Bottom line on DARE program is its a utter failure and the only reason its still going is for intel into private lives and homes.

[srkruzich]

Steve, my wife I were both involved in D.A.R.E. and PDAP when our kids were in school and I never once seen anyone try to get kids to tell anything about what their parents were doing. You must have gotten involved in a bad program. We desperatly need these programs and they do lots of good. It is disturbing to see someone make statements like you did and it is damaging to the programs.

It is a total invasion of privacy. The surgeon general of the United STates has deemed it a failure.  Look it up.  I didn't make any of this up. 

[Catwoman]

I was once very much involved in the D.A.R.E. program...And your opinion would be laughable, if it weren't so pathetically misguided.  You would be well advised to get in touch with someone who adminstrates the program and get some information on the program, its guidelines and expected outcomes.  At the very least...Spare yourself the embarrassment of repeating this diatribe in front of anyone else publically.  What you have posted here are incidents that, while they might have happened in that isolated instance, are not the standard for the rest of the country.  It would be like my stating that because you are posting on here, you would be the standard by which I should judge Elk County and all its inhabitants...Which wouldn't be fair to the rest of the fairly forward thinking population who lives there.  

[Wilma]

Catwoman, thank you for understanding and stating that most of Elk County isn't so misguided in their thinking.

[srkruzich]

I was once very much involved in the D.A.R.E. program...And your opinion would be laughable, if it weren't so pathetically misguided.  You would be well advised to get in touch with someone who adminstrates the program and get some information on the program, its guidelines and expected outcomes.  At the very least...Spare yourself the embarrassment of repeating this diatribe in front of anyone else publically.  What you have posted here are incidents that, while they might have happened in that isolated instance, are not the standard for the rest of the country.  It would be like my stating that because you are posting on here, you would be the standard by which I should judge Elk County and all its inhabitants...Which wouldn't be fair to the rest of the fairly forward thinking population who lives there.  

This is for you to read, not that i think you will. But you need proof, so here it is.

Dare Does not work (Surgeon General Report)
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/youthviolence/chapter5/sec4.html
One school-based universal prevention program meets the criteria for Does Not Work: Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE. DARE is the most widely implemented youth drug prevention program in the United States. It receives substantial support from parents, teachers, police, and government funding agencies, and its popularity persists despite numerous well-designed evaluations and meta-analyses that consistently show little or no deterrent effects on substance use. Overall, evidence on the effects of the traditional DARE curriculum, which is implemented in grades 5 and 6, shows that children who participate are as likely to use drugs as those who do not participate. However, some positive effects have been demonstrated regarding attitudes toward police.

1992 - Indiana University

Researchers at Indiana University, commissioned by Indiana school officials in 1992, found that those who completed the D.A.R.E. program subsequently had significantly higher rates of hallucinogenic drug use than those not exposed to the program.[10]
[edit] 1994 - National Institute of Justice

Other researchers found D.A.R.E. to be counterproductive in 1994.[11] In 1994, the National Institute of Justice published a summary[12] of a study conducted by the Research Triangle Institute.[13] The study suggested that D.A.R.E. would benefit from a revised curriculum. This was launched in the fall of 1994.

After the 1994 Research Triangle Institute study,[12][13] an article in the New Times Los Angeles stated that the "organization spent $41,000 to try to prevent widespread distribution of the RTI report and started legal action aimed at squelching the study."[14] The director of publication of the American Journal of Public Health told USA Today that "D.A.R.E. has tried to interfere with the publication of this. They tried to intimidate us."[15] After reporter Dennis Cauchon published a story questioning the effectiveness of D.A.R.E. in USA Today, he received letters from classrooms around the country, all addressed to "Dear D.A.R.E.-basher," and all using nearly identical language.[15]
[edit] 1995 - California Department of Education

In 1995, a report to the California Department of Education by Joel Brown Ph. D. stated that none of California's drug education programs worked, including D.A.R.E. "California's drug education programs, D.A.R.E. being the largest of them, simply don't work. More than 40 percent of the students told researchers they were 'not at all' influenced by drug educators or programs. Nearly 70 percent reported neutral to negative feelings about those delivering the antidrug (sic) message. While only 10 percent of elementary students responded to drug education negatively or indifferently, this figure grew to 33 percent of middle school students and topped 90 percent at the high school level." [16]
[edit] 1998 - National Institute of Justice

In 1998, A grant from the National Institute of Justice to the University of Maryland resulted in a report to the NIJ, which among other statements, concluded that "D.A.R.E. does not work to reduce substance use."[17] D.A.R.E. expanded and modified the social competency development area of its curriculum in response to the report. Research by Dr. Dennis Rosenbaum in 1998,[18] found that D.A.R.E. graduates were more likely than others to drink alcohol, smoke tobacco and use illegal drugs. Psychologist Dr. William Colson asserted in 1998 that D.A.R.E. increased drug awareness so that "as they get a little older, they (students) become very curious about these drugs they've learned about from police officers."[19] The scientific research evidence in 1998 indicated that the officers were unsuccessful in preventing the increased awareness and curiosity from being translated into illegal use. The evidence suggested that, by exposing young impressionable children to drugs, the program was, in fact, encouraging and nurturing drug use.[20] Studies funded by the National Institute of Justice in 1998,[17][21] and the California Legislative Analyst's Office in 2000[22] also concluded that the program was ineffective.

[greatguns]

If nothing illegal is going on in the home then it really shouldn't be a problem. 

[Catwoman]

Yes, I have read this particular bit of "information" before.  I'm no more impressed with it now than I was then.  Have been around this block more than once, I don't have a tendency to take what is written and take it as being gospel, chapter and verse for all of the rest of God's creations.  I have seen this program do a great amount of good...I have seen children become adept at being able to say no to peer pressure in the area of offered drugs.  I have seen the self confidence this program can inspire.  So...As soon as you can come up with something better, I'm sure that all of the schools will jump at the chance to adopt it... .