The D.A.R.E. Program

When I was younger I saw people that had on shirts saying D.A.R.E. They looked super cool and I wanted one of my own, though I didn’t know what they meant or what they were for. I thought maybe it was a drama club or a bunch of storytellers. Then I finally found out what it was for and let me tell you, it was awesome.

3 years later I walked into class, and my teacher announced what D.A.R.E. meant (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). I never would have thought it would be about mental health and safety. That Monday a police officer came in and gave us workbooks. They had so many questions with the words next to the lines: Define, Access, Respond, and Evaluate. He read out the problem, wrote at the top of the page and asked us what was happening in the situation. After someone answered he would write that on the whiteboard, everyone wrote that next to Define. Then he asked us what we could do in that situation. We gave a bunch of options and he wrote that on the whiteboard too. We wrote all the possible things we could do next to Access. After that he told us to pick one or two of the options and we had to write it next to Respond. Then next to evaluate we had to write a reason why we picked that.

When we were finished writing we watched a video of people explaining things about drugs and alcohol, what they did to us, and why we should avoid them. We learned that choices have consequences and that It’s our own fault if we choose being “cool” over being safe. At the end of the lesson we went to the last two pages of the workbook and there were meanings next to blank lines. We had to read the meaning and fill in the words that the description matched. The word was always something to do with what we learned that day. When he left I was looking forward to every Monday when he would come back and teach us more. I was super interested in D.A.R.E.

Little did I know that eight weeks later would be the funnest last two weeks of D.A.R.E. We got at least ten options on what to do for a project showing everything we learned. One option was a game and I decided to make a Jeopardy on slides! I picked five topics (stress, alcohol/drugs, pressure, D.A.R.E, and friend). Stress was about the four types of stress we learned about, alcohol/drug was about tobacco and what happens when you drink under age, pressure is about the four types of pressure we learned, D.A.R.E. was about what the letters mean when writing in the workbook (define, access, respond, evaluate), and friend was about if a friend is good or not when pressuring or helping. We got a checklist to make sure we included everything and I think it turned out so good!

I truly love D.A.R.E. because it’s so interesting and exciting, I hope everyone in my school that is grade 5 or under looks forward to it as well!