City seeks new drug prevention program

MARION - An organized drug prevention program will likely return to Marion City Schools, but Chief Bill Collins and others indicated it probably won't be the well-known DARE program.

Collins said that at a national level, there are statistics for and against the effectiveness of DARE, or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, but in Marion, it hadn't had long-lasting success in its last run some 10 to 12 years ago.

"The highest percentage of people we have overdosing on heroin are in their mid-20s so if you do the math, you know, our DARE program was in effect (when they were in school)," Collins said.

Now that officials are bringing back a program with the same mission, Collins said they wanted to evaluate options to see how effective they are.

"You want to make sure the money you're spending is going to an effective program," he said.

The initiative came out of discussions among Collins and Marion City Council members Josh Daniels, Lisa Cunningham and Kevin Norris, and then talks with Jody Demo-Hodgins, director of the Crawford-Marion Board of Alcohol, Drug Addiction, and Mental Health Services.

"We talk about the heroin epidemic we're facing, we're not going to be out of that situation in a year or two years or three years," Collins said. "It's going to take us getting to the kids that are in fifth, sixth, seventh grade to make that conscious choice that they're not going to use drugs."

This plan is still in the beginning stages, he said, and the police department may remove itself from the program as Collins said officers may not be the best educators.

"We have teachers, we have ADAMH people, maybe they're better suited to handle that and ... provide that education to people," he said. "I think it's going to take a collaboration of more than one agency."

The next step of the plan is a March 1 meeting between the City Council and Jim Ryan, a state-certified prevention professional with the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention Association of Ohio.

"He'll give information about what is existing in Marion and what other things we might as a community to meet our needs," said Demo-Hodgins, who arranged the meeting.

She said that while Marion has state-certified prevention professionals, they wanted an outside perspective on what evidence-based programs may be best.

"We have to look at what's existing now, what kind of things could be done from both a prevention and intervention standpoint, and who's the best person to deal with the delivery of that program," Demo-Hodgins said.

She said the program would have to go beyond the schools to help parents talk to children about not using drugs, and that providing a program for all schools may not be economically feasible.

shickey@marionstar.com

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Twitter: @SpenserHickey