Commission Plans Community-Wide Drug Prevention Effort

FALMOUTH- Drug prevention for teens is about to get a huge push in the Town of Falmouth.
The Falmouth Human Services Committee and the Falmouth Substance Abuse Commission just received word this week that the town has been awarded a $625,000 grant to be dispersed over five years targeting drug prevention by bringing the community together in a “coalition” to deal with the problem.
“We’re very excited,” Karen M. Cardeira, a social worker with the Human Services Department, said. “It’s a big accomplishment for the town.
Getting the grant was a very competitive process, Ms. Cardeira said. In all, 199 grants were awarded out of 419 applications, with Falmouth among the communities receiving the maximum amount given.
John Walters, the director of the National Drug Control Policy, informally known as the White House Drug Czar, awarded a total of $24.4 million in grants to communities across the country. In a prepared statement, Mr. Walters said, “Youth drug use has dropped 24 percent since 2001, due in large part to the active and effective engagement of strong community anti-drug coalitions.”
The grant goes toward a program called, Communities That Care, which Ms. Cardeira called, “a proven prevention-planning system used nationwide to build community consensus so all sectors are working collaboratively towards prevention.”
In order to get the grant, Ms. Cardeira and Suzanne K. Hauptmann, the town’s youth social worker, who wrote the grant application, had to get numerous organizations and departments in the community to sign on.
They succeeded in getting 12 sectors of the community to participate, including schools, police, parents, adolescents, the Volunteers in Public Schools (VIPS), the Falmouth Chamber of Commerce, the town government, the Falmouth Clergy Association, Together We Can, the Cape Verdean Club, and Gosnold Inc. The Falmouth Enterprise also signed on to the program to represent the media.
Ms. Cardeira explained that the grant money will be used for different things in different years and part of the money will go toward a full-time coordinator to manage the program. The job description for the substance abuse coalition coordinator includes a master’s degree in public health, social work, or the equivalent. The pay scale is $48,000 to $54,000.
In the first year of the grant, the goal is to bring together all the different stakeholders in the community for training on how to prevent substance abuse in the community. The idea, Ms. Cardeira said, is “so we’re all on the same page and working collaboratively together.”
Ms. Cardeira said. “Everyone recognizes that substance abuse is a bit of an issue here. They are all working on it the best way they know how. Bringing everyone together to share ideas and work together will mean we’ll be more effective.”
For example, there are already drug awareness programs in the schools, but those can perhaps be enhanced by involving others from the community, Ms. Cardeira said.
The town will contract with an organization called Southeast Center for Healthy Communities to do the community training, which will take place at four sessions of several hours, each scheduled over the course of the year.
The training sessions will focus not so much on substance abuse itself, but on the things that take place in town that may lead younger children toward substance abuse.
“There will be a lot of training to look at the community in depth to see how we can better meet the needs of kids when they are growing up, so they don’t choose those behaviors,” Ms. Cardeira said.
The next step will be for key people from each organization to form a planning committee that will put together an action plan for the next four years.
The idea is to try to prevent children from getting involved in drugs at a young age because studies show that the older a child is when he or she has a first experience with drugs, the fewer problems the person will have in adulthood with substance abuse.
Ms. Cardeira said the average age that youngsters first try drugs in Falmouth is age 13. One goal of the program will be to increase that age to 15.
Another goal is to reduce substance abuse among Falmouth teens by 10 percent.
How those goals are reached is going to depend largely on the work of volunteers and members of the coalition who will educate the community about the risk factors for drug use and develop an inventory of resources for youth and families, among other projects.
Surveys are also a part of the process, and Falmouth public school students from grades six through 12 will be surveyed every two years to track changes in alcohol and drug use rates.
The hope is that mobilizing the community will not just help in the short term, but it will lead to long-term community-wide changes, Ms. Cardeira said.