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The Perfect Union: Character Education and Safe, Drug-Free Schools Programs
Barbara Murphy, Consultant, Safe, Drug-Free Schools Programs,
Ohio Department of Education
First, I’m going to give you an overview of the Safe, Drug-Free Schools Program in Ohio. Then, I’ll give you an idea of some other ways the money can be used because there are very broad categories for funds that can be spent for the program. Then we’re also going to talk about the whole idea of asset development and how character education, and a lot of the things that we do in prevention, fit into a bigger picture of school climate and school culture.
The Safe and Drug-Free program is money that has been available to every district in the state since the 1987-88 school year. It started out specifically to focus on drug prevention education, but in ’94 we realized a lot of the risk factors that pertained to drug use also pertained to violence. So we broadened it to safety and drug and alcohol and tobacco prevention. What this does is give you a summary of some of the categories of the activities that you can spend these funds on. It is money that is set aside, in a sense, for a district. But you need to meet some federal requirements in order for the funds to flow to your district.
The most significant requirement was put into place just a couple of years ago called the “principles of effectiveness”. What the principles of effectiveness require is that you need to look at your data to assess what’s going on in your local school community. What do you see as the greatest needs or the most significant problems? Then it asks you, based on that data, to write some specific and measurable performance indicators.
Those indicators are based on what the most significant problems in a district are, and then people have to identify to us, as the third part of the principles of effectiveness, what kind of research-based programs or activities or strategies they will be using in order to target their particular problem areas.
We have defined research-based to mean programs that do have a research base, and also to apply strategies or frameworks or models that we know are based in research and have been shown to be effective. Those would be things like the risk-protective factor model, or asset development, or the resiliency model.
You need to have an advisory council in place that guides your Safe and Drug Free School grant. People have used funds to purchase curriculum for their district and we know there are some programs out there that really do show an impact. We’re seeing more and more of our districts use those types of programs. It’s also used for activities other than instruction, like after school programs, as long as they’re focused around violence, alcohol, tobacco, or team and leadership groups. We’re working with special activities, like sports or extra-curricular activities to train team leaders and coaches.
Another activity we see a lot of is conflict-resolution activities or mediation groups. There’s also an additional grant through the department and the commission on dispute-resolution for school conflict management. These funds can also be used in that way. We told people that they can use up to 20% of the money for security, but after Columbine we lifted that cap for a period of time so that people would be able to buy what they needed. Of course we were immediately told that everybody would misuse that and that they would buy all kinds of equipment they didn’t need, but that hasn’t happened. The equipment that people have asked for has been very appropriate and very few districts have has used all their funds for security. Columbine, or other incidents of violence, has more to do with the culture of a school and relationships among students, parents, teachers, and administrators. If we just put in metal detectors, that doesn’t do anything about the fact that there may be groups in the school who are very negative and in some cases violent toward one another. So, most people recognize you need to get at the culture, but we do allow some equipment and security personnel expenditures. Resource officers can be very effective. Their training is different because they’re there to help educate kids, develop relationships with them, relationships with teachers, also to help with crime prevention on the campus.
One of the things Drug-Free funds can be used for is development and implementation of character education programs. However, this needs to be a component of the drug and violence prevention program, and it needs to be tailored to the community. Community needs are different around the state. But, it makes it very hard to measure the impact of programs because everybody is doing so many different things. I would say to you, if you’re not familiar with how your Safe Drug-Free money is being used, find out. Very often, one thing we found is it may be being spent on things that you’re not even aware are even part of the Safe and Drug-Free program, or the other issue is there hasn’t been a lot of guidance on how to spend it so it keeps getting spent on the same things. Materials could be just sitting on the shelf and aren’t really being used by anybody. So get in there and really look at how it’s being spent, and maybe even how you can collaborate with some of the other federal programs.
One of the nice things about the consolidated local plan is now everybody has to submit one application electronically in order to access federal funds from nine programs. The way the department is moving is, eventually you would submit one plan to access any money whatsoever from the department, including state and federal funds. Why should you write it fifteen million times for every different grant application? We need to know overall what you’re doing, how the funds tie in, and we definitely believe that school climate and safe, drug-free schools are an essential part of school reform.
We’ve gotten too focused on outcomes like the proficiency test, which are important, but we also have a lot of kids out there who have significant barriers to learning. We have a lot of research now that shows us that kids who are troubled or feel their environment is unsafe psychologically or physically, are not able to learn. Until you do things to make school a caring place where kids do feel engaged, we’re not going to see positive outcomes. For some kids who come from the worst environments, the research is telling us that the most significant variable is if they have a place to come to during the day - one safe place to come to where somebody cares about what happens to them. So, how does character education fit into all of this?
One thing I see happening is that every time there’s a problem identified in our country, there’s a grant program set up for it and there’s a curricula for it and you have to have an advisory council for it. For example we do this for teen pregnancy, for violence, for safety, etc. But what we’ve come to realize in the prevention field is that there are a number of key things that we do that will prevent virtually every risky behavior. Not for every kid, but it has been shown that these certain things that we do really do help with all of these problem areas. What are the universal prevention activities that we can do that will impact every kid? We have a tendency, to focus on “mopping up the blood”. That’s where the resources go, that’s where the energy goes, and yet if we were to put more of our energy on the front end, and really do some solid prevention, we may not see some of the problems on the back end. We have a tendency to not be very patient though. Drugs are a focus one time, two years later it’s safety and we want to drop everything else we’re doing. I think we need to get committed to these things that we know work.
One of the models, and it’s the way that I see character education really fitting into the life of a school, is the asset development model. The Search Institute in Minnesota developed the asset development model. It’s been developed over a number of years, and they began by surveying young people in a variety of communities, from a variety of economic backgrounds. Initially they identified thirty assets that when present, seemed to protect kids from risk behaviors. Kids with these assets did well academically, had good health habits, had a positive attitude, and showed caring toward others. This model has grown, and now there are forty developmental assets that have been identified by the Search Institute.
The reason why I like asset development is I feel people understand it immediately because it is common sense. People just see it and know what to do. It’s the only thing I’ve ever talked to parents about that they really got excited about because they saw immediately their role in how to build assets. Prevention people have a tendency to talk to parents very theoretically, but a lot of sound prevention is common sense. The problem is in our culture; a lot of the relationships and experiences that were in place and used to build assets have disintegrated. So what we really need to do is consciously and intentionally build these assets into the lives of young people. We have to begin looking at the assets that the adults have within that setting, because you can’t give away what you don’t have. If you’re not a total, healthy person and feel supported and feel a sense of caring and belonging in your school, it’s pretty hard to show that type of thing to young people and get them to believe it.
Basically the asset framework looks at two sets of assets, twenty external assets, and twenty internal assets. The external assets fall into four categories, they are things like support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, and constructive use of time. These are the things that kids gain by having experiences with people and different types of activities. They get it through relationships and by interacting with different people. The internal assets are things like commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies, and positive identity.
I really do believe that kids have a lot of good in them, but often we have to help them discover some of these things. Maybe they haven’t been exposed to positive values, but given the opportunity to see them in action, to see people role-modeling them, to have it be a part of the life of the school, it will allow some of those positive values to emerge.
The first external asset is support, and research is emerging that shows how essential support is. A lot of people look at our programs as kind of soft and not essential. They say, if we have some money we’ll do it, we’re here to hit the basics. Well, I think that we found that this is really the basics. There was a major study done about two years ago, the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health. It followed a large number of young people over time, and included interviews with parents, interviews with teachers, and interviews with significant adults in the community. The two things that were shown to be the most essential to protect kids from violent behavior, early sexual involvement and teen pregnancy, drug, alcohol and tobacco use, depression and suicide, were family connectedness and school connectedness. And by connectedness, kids meant “Somebody cares about me. Somebody cares about what happens to me, somebody cares about my life and thinks I'm interesting.” It sounds so simple, but I think in our culture and our fast pace we are not really focused as much on relationships as we used to be.
Family member support would be ideal, but we also know there are kids who don’t have that and might never have that even if we work very significantly with their families. There are some people who are so wounded they can’t even give to their children what’s considered essential. But that child can connect with another adult relationship. It could be somebody in the community, it could be a neighbor, and very often it is a school person.
There was a study done on mentoring by Big Brothers, Big Sisters. They found that if mentors went into the project with the attitude of “I’m going to teach them not to use drugs, I’m going to tell them to live this way, do these things”, it wasn’t as effective. The mentors who went in and just began to build a relationship with that child and find out what they were interested in, what they liked, what they cared about, those kids showed lower drug use and violence and risk behaviors than the ones where they went in intentionally to try to tell them the way that they should live.
Support is most important. A caring school climate is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. You know it when you walk through the building, even if it is a very poor building. One school I worked in was in a poor community, the building had hardly anything, but the people had so much love for that place. You could tell it was their community. They would bring in flowers, they had the kids’ work displayed, it just gives a feeling of connectedness – that people cared about each other. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with monetary resources, it’s what we create as the adults in the building.
Another external asset is empowerment. The key here is, do we use young people as resources? We have a tendency to mistrust people these days. There’s a mindset out there that kids are no good, they’re worse than they ever have been, there’s no redeeming them, we need to somehow socialize them. I’ve got to tell you the truth; I see the exact opposite. A US News and World Report article last spring, a year after the Columbine tragedy, featured five young people, some from high risk backgrounds, who were really making a difference in their community, in their schools, had a strong sense of caring and empathy for others, and were really committed to making a difference. I think that’s more prevalent than we think. We need to begin to trust kids, and help them learn skills on how to run things. They come up with some of the best ideas and some things that they know other kids need and want.
A good example is a school district that had a new principal who was very concerned about school climate. He started watching all the different groups in school, and he began at lunch to sit down with the different groups to get to know them and find out their feelings about school climate, and he decided he wanted to pull kids together to ask, “How can we make this better?” What can we do to make this a place that you really want to come to, that you feel excited about? And he was able to get each group to send a representative to a small, school climate group. And I had a chance to listen to these kids, and it was just incredible. Students were using terms like the word empowered. They said, “Well, we got together and we determined, with our principal, that these are some rules that need to be in place, and we are monitoring it, and we know that they are trusting us, and that if we can’t live up to this responsibility, then we know that the adults will have to step in and do some things. But right now they trust us, and we’re going to make this work.” Now, can you see what a great example that is of using kids as resources?
I used to work with the Project Charlie program, which was one of the early prevention programs. One of the activities in Project Charlie is to develop rules for the classroom at the beginning of the year. When you allow kids to do that, they take ownership in what’s happening in that classroom, in that building. It’s not being done to them or being imposed on them. They feel that you respect them. Adults always do have the final say, but I think we need to use students more than we have in the past.
Boundaries and expectations are also important. Schools do a fair job of boundaries. Some families don’t do a good job with limits, perhaps because people spend such a small amount of time with their kids that they don’t want to offend them. They fear that if they tell their children they can’t do something, they’re going to be angry. Yet, what I found over and over is that students are anxious and upset if you do not set boundaries. I used to run a support group for kids who were chemically dependant and came from some pretty rough backgrounds. There was a young girl in my group who literally raised herself. Her mother and sister committed suicide, her father was an alcoholic, and she could come and go as she pleased. She just took care of herself completely. Fifteen years old, and Children’s Services didn’t want to do anything because she was so close to being sixteen. She was a real tough girl, she would brag about this to the kids, and they all thought, “Oh boy, has she got it good. I have to be home at eleven.” I remember her sitting in my office one day and saying to me, “I just really wish somebody cares if I ever even showed up at night.” And so, I have to believe that having those boundaries is such a way of showing that caring, even if they’re mad at you, even if they hate you for it, deep inside kids need that.
The last set of external assets is constructive use of time. These are things that can be considered creative activities. The arts and music have been shown to be very positive variables in a young person’s life. I don’t know if it has to do with the discipline or the practicing, but they are key. Youth programs, being part of a religious community, spending time at home are also important. I think one thing that can happen is that we get so into chauffeuring kids to a million activities that everybody’s burned out, everybody’s ticked off because they’re just so tired. I have this one friend who tells me, “Well, every week my kids will do an emotional, physical, spiritual, intellectual activity.” I’m thinking, “Oh my god, I think I’d shoot myself if somebody told me I had to do that.” But, one thing they did find with middle-school aged kids, is that an excess of activities is actually distressing. Some parents are pulling back and saying no to some of these things. Make some clear choices about a couple of things that the kids might be involved in, but not let all family time be consumed by activities. One person told me their son’s coach insisted on practice on Thanksgiving, but he refused to give up the family Thanksgiving for a school sport. I think we have to begin to recapture family time and say no to those types of things.
A significant number of the external and internal assets relate to the school setting. Overall, asset development is something everybody needs to do. But many of these can be supported in the school. How do we get them involved in homework and to read for pleasure? How do we get them committed to and engaged in school and make them want to achieve, want to do their best? When you have a relationship with kids, they will work for you. Not every kid, but if you challenge them and find out what they’re excited about and help them into something that is important to them, it’s amazing what they will do. I have a little neighbor who came over one day, he was so excited, he goes, “Miss Barbara, I get to present the letter ‘g’ tomorrow. Find me stuff with g.” So we went through magazines and he was so excited about doing that. We do a lot of that at the elementary level, but over time some of the things where we really ask kids what they’re interested in, we lose sight of at the secondary level.
There are ways that we can make the secondary schools more of a caring place to be. How do you teach positive values? Some character education programs focus on a character trait of the week or day. But, getting them internalized is more than discussing the character trait for the day. Not that that’s bad, but if you have a character trait like caring for the day, and the teacher is negative and abusive to the kids in the class, or the kids are really beating up on one another and no adult intervenes, what’s the real message that they’re getting? We have to live and model the character traits in our relationships with one another. If we don’t live it kids will never internalize it. We have to talk about it. What does it mean? What does it mean to be a caring person? What do you think that person feels? Sometimes we’re afraid to do that, but I can’t believe there’s really another way to get kids to act in a caring or a responsible way. What does that mean? I had a little girl come into my building as part of our shadowing days, and I remember we were talking about responsibility. And she started sharing, she said, “Well, you know, our DARE officer taught us about that. I was talking to him and I started to realize, my mom, you know, we don’t have very much money, and my mom works really hard, and you know, I just don’t care if I lose stuff. I just don’t think it’s a big deal. Then I started to realize, boy she works so hard, maybe I need to be more responsible about keeping the stuff that she works so hard for me to have.” To me, she has internalized what responsibility means.
This is true for many of these social competencies. We need to teach decision-making, we need to help kids with really interpersonal skills such as how do I listen to someone? How do I make friends? We assume people know how to do that, and many, many children don’t. Cultural competence deals with how do we really respect diversity and really learn about other people’s cultures? Resistance skills are important, not only resistance to drugs, but also resistance to the many negative choices that are out there. It’s showing restraint, and also peaceful conflict resolution. There is so much anger and rage, not just among kids, but also among adults. Our culture is moving at such a fast pace that even some of us who know how to negotiate a conflict don’t choose to do it any more because we’re so mad and we want to get on to the next thing. For example, I was in my car the other day and this guy cuts me off, and for about five seconds I thought, “We’re at a stop light, I’m getting out of this car and I’m going to run over there and tell him what I think of him.” Then I thought, “Come on, this guy’s probably just had a bad day, why am I taking this so personally?”
We see a lot of our kids reacting that way, just responding with rage. There are ways of talking things out. This is a good skill for teachers to have. Sometimes parents come into school and they are mad, and you’ve had a bad day or you’re tired, this kid’s been a real disruption, so what’s your first response? “Well let me tell you something!” We need to sit back and let it roll off us and think, “What’s the best way to respond, not just react?” It’s a skill that everybody needs to have. These are the major components in every prevention curricula.
What’s important is the way these components are taught. We can’t just talk about these skills. We have to use what’s called interactive or active teaching of these skills. That means practicing the skill and it means getting feedback from other people on how we are doing. Information alone is not going to be enough. You need to have opportunities to use those skills and really be reinforced for using them, and be given feedback when you are not using them.
The final asset is positive identity. That (includes) things like feeling you have a sense of control over the future. There are a lot of kids out there who really think they are destined for a bad life, that whatever is going to happen is going to happen and it probably isn’t going to be good. This attitude makes it difficult to overcome challenges. You have to somehow give that hope back to young people and let them know that although they can’t control everything, they do have some control over their destiny and what happens to them. They’re making choices, and those choices have consequences, and they can choose differently. Are they going to get it the first time? No. Sometimes you say things a hundred times before it finally sinks in and there’s a different way of thinking, or a different way to live.
Self-esteem is based on a sense of accomplishment. It’s not sitting together and saying how wonderful we are, and I'm capable and lovable. What is there to sustain it beyond just the words? What are we doing to give kids that sense of purpose and accomplishment? How do we give them a view of a positive, personal future?
I’m going to show a video from the Search Institute called Great Places to Learn. It’s a wonderful tool for school people to use if you really want to go about building assets and creating this kind of climate that we’ve been talking about. We’re going to show it in segments so we can talk a little bit.
Video
When I see that part of the videotape it strikes me how many people come to my mind who were that kind of person to me and really changed my life, and I didn’t know it at the time. I'm curious if anybody has any examples in your own life?
(Audience) I had this teacher, she was my English teacher, which was the first time I had an African American teacher, and she also worked over in Ireland and she inspired me to go and really taught me how to write and I saw her maybe three years ago at a college football game and she knew my name. She said, “Sharon, what are you doing?” And it blew my mind that she remembered. I'm going to go home and call her.
Anybody else?
(Audience) I finished a doctorate at the University of Michigan ten years ago, and at the time I was an older student, and I really didn’t believe I’d ever get it done. And I think I was so impressed with the professors there who urged me on and so many times in that process, because I really didn’t know if I could do it. And it was those people there that really went out of their way to say, “You can do this. Keep going. Don’t give up.” And I’ll never forget that.
There were several, but one comes to mind. She was a seventh and eighth grade teacher and she was very encouraging for me. She always encouraged me to stretch and I remember once she had recommended me for our commencement speaker, and I had a cold at the time. So when I read for it I said, “I have a cold.” Well, I didn’t get it, but when I read, I read clearly, no break in my voice or anything. Nothing that seemed like I had a cold, and she told me afterwards, “You never make an excuse. You always do your best.” And I think that stayed with me, really. I’m sure she’s deceased, because she was an elderly teacher at that time, and it’s been a long time.
I have three boys and I asked them to identify the teacher that had the most influence on them, and one son chose his elementary school gym teacher. I thought, “It’s worked. He really understands it’s not all up here. It’s in his heart as well as his mind.” And I thought what a nice way for the school district to model to help those kids see it’s not all your intellectual ability, you can have those teachers recognized too.
Mike Magnusson, my coworker, frequently asks people, “What had the biggest influence in your life?” They never say, “Oh this prevention curriculum, or my health textbook.” It always comes back to people and relationships with those people. One example is a principal at a school I worked with. Her school was like walking into a living room, it was so comfortable. But there was a young man with serious problems, and he had just gotten off probation. He had been in a juvenile center and came back and he was messing up. So she brings him into the office, and she said, “I'm just not going to let you get away with this. I'm not going to let you fail. You are too good for this kind of behavior.” This is a very different message from, “You’re worthless and you’re never going to make it. See how you’re letting us down.”
(Audience) One thing at our school is we allow the kids who are graduating to pick the person that will present their diploma. A number of teachers they pick are elementary teachers, and these teachers just can’t believe it. The letters and things that we get from them, high school teachers, we kind of expect it, but when they’re from so-and-so who was their second grade teacher, you know these teachers write us these long letters saying I can’t believe it!
A great example of relationships is a situation where a young man brought a gun to school and a teacher ended up taking the gun away from him. This certainly doesn’t follow the crisis plan, but then I got to hear him talk. This was a new teacher that had the boy in the room, and the kid pulls out the gun, and here’s this first year teacher and he told the kids to get down on the ground. His partnering teacher is walking by and sees this, and walks into the classroom, and she went right up to the boy and put her hands on his face and said, “I love you. Please don’t do this.” I found out that the two teachers had learned about every single kid in that class, what they wrote, what they struggled with, their nicknames, what they cared about, and the pets they had. She knew she had a relationship with that kid.
I think this tape is worth buying and there’s a book that goes along with it. There are activities that you can do to build assets with kids. It comes from the Search Institute and they list some of their resources here and you can even get on their web site or you can call them.
Thank you for your time.