By Mark Ambrogi
For Boone County Sheriff’s Department Capt. Deb Martin, teaching children about Drug Abuse Resistance Education — or D.A.R.E. — has been a long-time pursuit.
“It’s about decision-making,” Martin said. “It’s about choosing whether to use drugs or not. It’s about choosing about whether to play hooky or disobey their parents. A lot of people think we’re teaching them about drugs. We’re teaching them about making good choices.”
Martin helped instruct several fifth and sixth graders who graduated May 6 from the D.A.R.E. program at Zionsville United Methodist Church’s R.O.C.K. program. Before their graduation, the students observed a drug-sniffing police dog in action and climbed into a police tank. ZMS fifth grader Taylor Osterling read her winning essay during the program.
Zoinsville Middle School sixth grader Isaac Lee said D.A.R.E. stresses life skills.
“It tells you how to be safe as a child,” Lee said. “It teaches you not to give in to peer pressure and to not do drugs. It helps you all the way up from child to teen to adult.”
R.O.C.K. director Kathy Gibson said she would like to see D.A.R.E. put back in the Zionsville Community Schools, like it is in the Western Boone and Lebanon school districts.
Martin said she did one D.A.R.E session at Zionsville Middle School in 2014.
“Afterwards, the kids came up and said, ‘why don’t you come more often?’,” Martin said. “We would be happy to do the whole program. I know it’s hard to get the time from the schools.”
ZCS superintendent Scott Robison said he’s “interested in seeing the [new]curriculum” for D.A.R.E., but program fees, material costs and instructional time “are not small barriers to implementing anything new.”
“We cannot afford elementary physical education with trained staff, and so, we would certainly not invest in programs that are not Indiana academic standards requirements while in this financial condition,” Robison stated.
