The Olympian

Issue date: 4/23/08 Section: News

April is Alcohol Awareness Month and Kitsap County is pulling together to keep teens from drinking through educational tools, programs and activities offered by local schools and the community.
The 2006 biennial Healthy Youth Survey Fact Sheet reflected that 30 percent of 10th grade students in Kitsap County reported alcohol use in the past 30 days, compared to the only 16 percent of eighth grade students.
According to the Washington State Healthy Youth Survey Web site, the HYS is a statewide survey created to gain information on adolescents by identifying trends in their patterns of behavior over time.
This information is used to support county prevention coordinators, community mobilization coalitions, community public health and safety networks and others to guide policy and programs that serve youth.
This quarter, Olympic College will be administering to students a Core Survey created by the Core Institute at Southern Illinois University.
Toni Hartsfield, OC director of student programs and leadership development, said the purpose of the survey is to provide the OC Alcohol and Other Drugs Task Force a narrowed scope of the alcohol and other drugs issues specifically affecting OC students so that programs can be tailored to fit the needs of the students.
OC Student Organizer Lorielle Hope volunteered to be on the AOD Task Force. She is the former president of Students Against Destructive Decisions at Olympic High School. Hope said that one of the alcohol and other drug preventative activities SADD would put on was a mock car crash.
"They would actually take real wrecked cars from an alcoholic or drug involved accident and put them in the school parking lot and we would act it out," said Hope. "It's intense."
Patti Sgambellone, student assistance professional at Olympic Educational Service District 114, is the drug and alcohol counselor at Bremerton High School. She said she works with students in drug and alcohol education classes, both individually by referral, or in groups and takes surveys before and after to see if their behaviors changed.
Sgambellone said students recently completed a campaign where 300-400 students signed up to be drug and alcohol free and wrote their names and reasons for their choice on cut-out paper hands that were later placed on a large piece of poster paper on the wall with the theme, "Reach for the stars, the sky is the limit when you are drug and alcohol free."
Sgambellone said right before spring break she held another activity where students thought of someone they wished would stop using or someone they had lost to drugs or alcohol and then they wrote that person's name on a hospital band to promote awareness.

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