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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Drug Addiction say prevention education is vital in both primary and secondary school settings.
The newspaper sent surveys to 38 school districts in Butler, Warren, Montgomery, Greene, Miami, Clark and Champaign counties asking at what grade levels students get drug education, how much they receive and what kind. The 13 schools that responded represent both large and small districts, and span all counties.
At seven of those schools, students do not get drug education until sixth grade or later. At four more, students in fourth or fifth grade participate in D.A.R.E., in which police officers come to the schools and present programs aimed at drug prevention.
Only two responsive schools, Lakota Local School District and Mad River Local Schools, said they have a complete kindergarten through high school health curriculum that follows state guidelines for opioid education.
Waiting until sixth grade to talk to kids about drugs and addiction may be too late, experts say. Students are typically age 11 or 12 by then, yet some recovering addicts have t0ld this newspaper they started using drugs as young as 10 years old.
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"You've got to start in kindergarten and you've got to do something every year and it's got to be age appropriate every year," said Attorney General Mike DeWine, who helped lead a joint committee with lawmakers last year that recommended K-12 drug education. "If we think we're going to do something in fifth grade and in ninth grade and that's going to work, we're crazy."
DeWine: ‘Most schools are not doing enough’
Although many schools are using D.A.R.E., the instruction doesn’t give students enough exposure to drug education, according to DeWine.
“D.A.R.E is only a half a year or a year,” said DeWine, a Republican who is running for governor. “What you really need is K through 12. Most schools are not doing enough.”
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A ‘monumental job’
The level of drug education provided by some schools is difficult to measure. Many local districts don’t have specific drug education programs in elementary schools, but use the PAX Good Behavior Game in some or all classrooms.
PAX teaches students self-regulation, self-control, and self-management while collaborating with others — curriculum that local teachers say improves both academic performance and has drug prevention benefits. A Johns Hopkins study found kids who participated in PAX in first grade were less likely to develop serious drug or alcohol addictions in adulthood.
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Some schools also said they try and integrate drug prevention messages into other subjects — even at grade levels where a formal drug education curriculum isn’t taught.
School instruction is only part of the answer to reducing addiction rates, school officials emphasized.
“Educating students about the dangers of drugs and the impact that drugs have on our society is a monumental job for all of us,” said Todd Yohey, superintendent of Lebanon City Schools. “Getting drug education to stick is difficult when the adults in a child’s life do not take responsibility for their own behaviors.”
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