Caccaviello for continuity

The human brain continues to develop well into the early twenties. During the late stages of development our brains continue to build upon the risk and reward system. The more developed our brains become, the better we are at calculating risk and deciding when a risk becomes too large.

  Even with all this development happening behind the scenes, humans still manage to make bad decisions. Learning to analyze risk and weigh rewards is crucial to decreasing the amount of bad decisions one may make. High school can be a great time to learn the risk and benefits of situations and this is what Botvin Lifeskills program focuses heavily on.

  This eight week program can be taught to students in the 4th -12th grades. Each year students learns new skills and build upon those previously learned. In the high school program, students are first taught to understand what good health and values are, then they practice finding the risks in situations and understanding how certain ones negate a healthy life and positive values. Decision making, media influence, and communication are also large pieces of the curriculum. When students are learning about risk through the Botvin program, they learn how to assess risk, what kind of risk taker they are, and why risks like substance use is much too large to take. The Botvin program asks students to find a public figure they look up to, and assess a risk they have taken. When students are asked to analyze a risk from someone they aspire to be it shows humility and educates them on the ability we all have to make bad decision. While education life the Botvin Lifeskills program cannot guarantee it will stop youth from making bad decisions, it does help build a foundation for good decision making to take place.

  If you would like to see the Botvin Program implemented in your school, contact a member of our Prevention team.

  To learn more about any of our programs or resource, please contact us at 970.522.4549 or Prevention@CentennialMHC.org.  

  If you or someone you know is in crisis or you’re worried about someone’s mental health or substance use call 844.493.TALK (8255) or call 970.522.4392.

  Centennial Mental Health Center provides behavioral health services to individuals in Cheyenne, Elbert, Kit Carson, Lincoln, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington and Yuma Counties.  Services include a variety of behavioral health service programs, outpatient therapy, community support programs, crisis intervention, emergency response, substance use disorder treatment, and child, adult and family counseling.

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Several area law enforcement agencies were among the recipients of grants from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office for drug use prevention education.

Statewide the attorney general awarded $3 million in grants to 152 police departments and sheriff’s offices agencies for programs in public schools.

According to a news release, the funds must be used to establish or maintain drug abuse prevention education and awareness programs for students during the 2018-19 school year.

The grant recipients are required to include over-the-counter and prescription drug abuse prevention education in their programs, according to the release.

“Age-appropriate substance abuse prevention education every year, at every grade level is key,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said in a statement. “Evidence-based prevention education helps students develop the skills they need to make good decisions, stay drug-free, and live healthier lives.”

According to the Attorney General’s Office, D.A.R.E. programs and school resource officer drug use prevention programs were eligible to apply for the grants. All programs must be conducted with the public school superintendent of each school district where programming will take place.

The Drug Use Prevention Grant Fund supports programs such as Botvin LifeSkills Training.

Read full article: Northeast Ohio departments awarded drug use prevention education grants

by Paul Halverson & Shawn Smith:

Misuse of alcohol and other drugs, including tobacco and opioids, often begins at an early age—sometimes as young as middle school. Because of this, it’s critical that prevention efforts start early, too. K-12 schools, where students learn many foundational skills and social behaviors, must become key partners in solving Indiana’s burgeoning substance-use epidemic.

Yet, too often, lack of information and resources constrain local schools and districts from meaningfully tackling this challenge, even as proven school-based prevention programs for grades K-12 are being implemented across the nation. In fact, only 11 percent of Marion County schools reported using a proven prevention curriculum, according to a September 2017 survey.

The Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation’s recent $10.2 million commitment to increase substance-use prevention programs in Marion County schools represents a major stride toward closing this programming gap. The 24 grants, awarded through the foundation’s Prevention Matters initiative, are projected to support 151 Marion County K-12 schools in delivering prevention programs to more than 71,000 students—44 percent of all students in the county—by the 2020-2021 school year.

These grants come at a critical time for addressing substance misuse in our city and state. An adult in Indiana today is more likely to die from a drug overdose than a car accident. Drug overdose deaths in our state rose more than eightfold from 1999 to 2016, largely fueled by deaths due to opioids.

Prevention education can play a critical role in addressing the problem, but starting in high school is too late. Among central Indiana eighth-graders, more than 10 percent report drinking alcohol and 5 percent report using marijuana in the past 30 days.

By the time students reach senior year of high school, those percentages jump to 33 percent drinking alcohol, 20 percent using marijuana, and 5 percent misusing prescription drugs in the past 30 days. What’s more, nearly 90 percent of adult smokers nationwide start by age 18.

To combat this, schools must be empowered to equip students with proven tools to lead safer and healthier lives. Prevention programs based on proven practices help schools achieve this. As one example, students who participated in an evidence-based substance-use prevention program, LifeSkills Training, were 28 percent less likely to smoke after a six-year check-in.

These results mean hospitals and health care providers around the state will see the benefits of prevention programs in reduced emergency visits, less chronic disease and an overall healthier community. This is especially important as health care costs in Indiana associated with drug abuse include $1.5 billion due to overdose deaths and nearly $450 million in non-fatal emergency room visits, hospitalizations for babies born dependent on opioids, and other hospitalizations.

The Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township is among the school districts that will benefit from funding and technical assistance to implement high-quality prevention programs. The district received more than $940,000 through Prevention Matters to deliver three proven programs at the elementary, middle and high school levels.

As a community, we must prioritize preventing substance misuse so we can avoid the tragic consequences of addiction down the road. Evidence-based programming in schools is one critical aspect of a comprehensive response by our city and state. Indiana’s substance use crisis starts at school

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Halverson is the founding dean of the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI. Smith is superintendent of the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township.

By Centennial Mental Health Center

When students enter seventh or eighth grade, they become more aware of their influence on themselves and others. It is not uncommon to see a new ego around this time, where some youth begin to think they are more important than before. This new way of thinking can be challenging for adults to adjust to, but these new developments can be fostered for good.

Centennial Mental Health Center’s Botvin LifeSkills program takes the hard times of development and teaches student how to put all the new energy to good use.

Our school-based substance use prevention specialists highly encourage schools participation in our free Botvin Lifeskills program. It is a highly interactive and educational eight week program for all students, grades 4th through 12th. Botvin doesn’t just scratch the surface of substance misuse; it gets to the foundation of why youth begin using substances and teaches them the necessary steps to saying no.

This program can be tailored to the classroom’s need and grade. Botvin LifeSkills is most effective when students are exposed to the program consecutively throughout their education. Students continue to build upon the skills they learned in the previous year and when started early — these skills become fine-tuned and ready.

The seventh and eighth grade modules teach students new ways to cope with anxiety and anger, new communications skills, assertiveness and conflict resolution. These new skills are paramount to youth development and help them learn to say no in high pressure situations, with confidence. Conflict resolution is taught by teaching students to turn “you and me into we.”

During this lesson, students learn ways to keep calm, calm the other person, and stand up for themselves while still being respectful.

To ensure your child is receiving the most comprehensive education on personal health and development, using this program, reach out to your school and administrators. School personnel can contact a member of the Prevention Team to get their school on board.

Marion Community Schools has been at work this summer preparing its teachers and social workers to better serve the counseling-related needs of its students, thanks to a major grant from the Lilly Endowment.

MCS’s $357,000 grant was awarded as part of a collaboration between the five school corporations in Grant County to write similar proposals for the grant with the help of Project Leadership.

The first period of the four-year grant began last fall and wraps up at the end of this summer, with a first-year data reporting deadline coming up Aug. 31.

In the first year of the grant, MCS has focused on training staff and teachers.

According to Michele Smith, director of education for MCS, grant funds have been used this summer to pay for planning hours for counselors during the summer and professional development for counselors and staff including paying for them to attend state-level conferences.

“We’ve been investing our dollars in our training,” she said.

For example, some MCS staff participated in a QPR (Question, Persuade and Refer) training for suicide prevention this spring along with representatives from each of the five Grant County schools.

According to Brenda Morehead, director of impact at Project Leadership, the event was designed to “train the trainer” so that representatives from each school could in turn go back to their respective schools and train more staff in QPR.

“We want to build our own capacity within our team,” Smith said. “We need to be able to sustain that (programming) after the grant is no longer supporting that.”

The school corporation has also been expanding the reach of its Botvin LifeSkills Training program so that more staff are trained in the substance abuse and violence prevention curriculum.

Whereas many of the other county schools have hired new staff and invested in new software programs using the grant funds, Marion Community Schools has focused on continuing and expanding its existing counseling services through Project Leadership and Family Services Society.

Morehead said in the first year of the grant MCS has largely continued with the same programming Project Leadership has provided for the corporation in the area of college and career counseling, for example enrolling junior high students in the 21st Century Scholars program and conducting college application labs for high school seniors. Similarly, Marion has been using the Botvin program through Family Service Society for several years already and continued its use this year under the grant.

“It’s really an expansion of what we’ve been doing,” Smith said. “It’s more that we’re able to take all of those services to another level.”

Patricia Gibson, communications director for MCS, said, “How I would describe it is that a lot of what we have done previously has been targeted at either a specific chronological point or smaller group of students. The way I’m seeing this grant is it’s allowing us to spread out those services to a wider group of students and be more proactive.”

Oak Hill and Eastbrook schools have chosen to frontload most of their expenses at the beginning of the four-year grant period in order to gather as much data about the impact of their initiatives as possible, but Gibson said MCS is spending relatively little in this first period and plans to ramp up spending later on.

“The year two through four plans entail a much higher funding level than the year one plan,” Gibson said.

In regards to what MCS plans to do with the higher funding in years two through four of the grant, Smith said they hadn’t settled on plans for exactly how to spend the money yet.

For one, they will continue to expand partnerships with Project Leadership and Family Services, including piloting a new Family Services intervention group at a to-be-determined elementary school location.

As for the rest of the spending and the possibility of new counseling initiatives, “we’re continuing to electively determine that,” Smith said. “The wheels are still turning as we dig into these areas of college and career and social and emotional needs.”

MCS plans to use data gathered from surveys of students to see where the needs are greatest.

“We’re going to be asking questions like, ‘Does the Botvin curriculum address all the needs? Currently all the social workers are equipped with Botvin training, but who else needs that training? How can we continue to expand that support and continue this work?’”

Morehead said MCS’s years two through four plan includes “a continuation” of contracting with Project Leadership for services and “exploring best practices for social-emotional curriculum and looking at using a college and career curriculum for grades K-12.”

The other county schools have also been contracting with Project Leadership and Family Service Society to implement new programming in their schools, and all five schools have cited the county-wide cooperation as something they are grateful for.

“The collective work being done by the coalition across the county is building a better future for all of our children, and we are proud to be a part of it so that we can better support our students and our community,” Smith said.

Read full article: Marion strengthens counseling services

The #MeToo movement has brought attention to sexual harassment in the movie industry, politics, restaurants and virtually every workplace in the country. But one place that it has been rampant in for years is in school. As the culture shifts to be more respectful of women’s rights, so too have educators’ approaches on how to instill that ethic within the male student population and to protect girls who feel their dignity has been affronted.

In a national study published in 2011 that canvassed nearly 2,000 female students in grades seven through 12, results indicated that 48 percent of the students experienced some form of sexual harassment in that school year. Close to 90 percent said it had a negative effect on them, according to the American Association of University Women, an advocacy group promoting equity and education for women and girls.

On social media and in letters received by the Daily American, women who graduated from some of Somerset County’s school districts said they had similar experiences while attending the local educational facilities.

Thomas Kakabar, superintendent of Conemaugh Township Area School District, said accusations made against students are handled through a disciplinary process. They investigate the claim and try to ascertain exactly what happened. They meet with parents, and if it was proven it took place, they would call for a punishment, right up to arrest and adjudication if warranted.

“The boys will be boys mentality isn’t acceptable anymore obviously with everything that has taken place in society,” Kakabar said. “That’s something we don’t permit or allow to take place here. Obviously, if it is reported to us. If they don’t tell us, we won’t know about it.”

Kakabar said he gets one or two reports a year dealing with sexual harassment or misconduct, and more often than not it deals with inappropriate touching more than commentary regarding body parts. Though statistically most incidents of sexual misconduct go unreported, Kakabar thinks that he’s getting the information on when they do.

“I think our kids are good about reporting things here,” he said. “There are issues we deal with on a weekly or daily basis. That’s one thing we feel lucky as administrators because our kids feel comfortable approaching us.”

Many of the local school districts have implemented the Botvin LifeSkills Training Program, which is used in schools and communities throughout the U.S. and in 39 countries around the world. Teens are educated early on how to deal with their sexual feelings and understand accepted limits. According to the program’s website, experts find that sexual harassment begins at the middle school level and escalates through high school. The program focuses on how teens and preteens learn to deal with treating the opposite sex as their own bodies develop.

Read full article: County school districts adjust in #MeToo era

GREENE COUNTY, PA – On Oct. 8, 2015, several hundred residents, law enforcement officers and other representatives packed the Greene County Courthouse for a standing-room-only town hall meeting focused on saving the rural county from its worsening epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction.

“It was the first time I saw the county stand up and say, ‘We have to do something,’” Greene County resident Jonathan Johnson said.

But while the town hall acknowledged the problem, several attendees left frustrated at what they felt was a lack of planning offered at the meeting to address it.

So the Coalition for a Brighter Greene was formed.

An all-volunteer organization of community residents, the coalition has worked to alleviate drug abuse rampant in Greene County since its formation following the town hall.

It sponsored the addiction-focused March for Greene, which on a rainy day in May 2016 attracted approximately 1,400 marchers through Waynesburg, some who displayed signs indicating they’d lost loved ones to drugs.

It installed a substance-abuse prevention program called Botvin LifeSkills Training at all five school districts in the county for grades 3 through 9.

It is working with Steps Inside, a Waynesburg-based recovery club, to set up a hotline for those in need of addiction help.

And it’s also targeting societal side effects of addiction.

The coalition is in the process of establishing an independent Court Appointed Special Advocate program to train and recruit volunteers to help Greene County courts make informed decisions on abused and abandoned children who come before the courts for service and placement.

The coalition is working with Greene County courts and school superintendents to establish a volunteer truancy mediation program designed to reverse the effects of absenteeism by encouraging communication between parents and school personnel and address issues impacting school attendance.

Rolling Meadows Church of God in Waynesburg hosts the coalition’s monthly board and committee meetings in Waynesburg. The church’s pastor, Rev. Richard Berkey, served as the coalition’s president from its inception until May and lamented that there are no detoxification facilities for addicts seeking recovery in Greene County. Berkey added that there have been very few Greene County-based recovery options for residents.

One of the most rural counties in Pennsylvania, Greene has been hit just as hard as more populous areas throughout the state. Greene County ranked sixth statewide in number of drug-related overdose deaths per 100,000 people with 14 in 2015 and ninth with 19 in 2016, according to a 2017 report by the Drug Enforcement Administration Philadelphia Division and the University of Pittsburgh.

Kari Diamond joined the coalition after her son’s father fatally overdosed in Feb. 2017.

“I just wanted to do something,” Diamond said.

Johnson, Berkey’s successor as coalition president, said that addicts often think they’re too broken to be saved.

The coalition aims to dispel that notion, Berkey said, by saving one life and one family at a time.

Coalition member Tom Schlosser offered that the opposite of addiction is community.

“I think that’s what we’re trying to do,” Schlosser said.

Read full article

SAIPAN – Six parents have completed a seven-day, Botvin LifeSkills Training Parent program conducted by William S. Reyes Elementary School.

According to WSR principal Naomi Nishimura, the program, which ended on Tuesday, was the parent component of the life-skills summer camp they offered to their third, fourth and fifth grade students in June.

Nineteen parents signed up for the program, but only six attended and completed the sessions.

Nishimura said among the topics discussed were  parental monitoring, how to be a good role model to one’s children, and using appropriate and consistent discipline.

They also had discussions on substance abuse, taking a stand against illegal drugs as well as knowing the effects and warning signs of substance use.

In June, about 60 students participated in the LifeSkills Training summer camp program which aimed to promote healthy activities designed to help them resist social pressures to smoke, drink alcohol or use illegal drugs.

Students were also taught how to develop self-esteem, self-mastery, and self-confidence, and effectively cope with social anxiety. They likewise learned the immediate and long-term consequences of substance abuse.

Nishimura said the LifeSkills sessions for the parents aim “to promote family communication.”

“A lot of them believe the program will help them. So we are hoping to do it again during the next school year.”

The Botvin LifeSkills Training program was funded through a grant from the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. and the Substance Prevention Services of the Community Guidance Center. The program is coordinated by Achieve, a private, non-profit organization “committed to promoting healthy lifestyles and social/emotional wellness.”

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