Bringing Back DARE

Sheriff's Race May Have Been Won on Pledge to Restart Program

"Students regularly tell me it did make a difference in their lives," Mickey Bailey said of the anti-drug program. (By James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)

A promise to bring back a popular but controversial drug education program to St. Mary's County schools might have made the difference in Tim Cameron's successful effort to unseat incumbent Sheriff David D. Zylak.

Cameron (R), who won 55 percent of the vote in the Nov. 7 election, based a significant part of his platform on restoring Drug Abuse Resistance Education, which Zylak (D) eliminated from county schools two years ago. Cameron's message appears to have registered with voters, dozens of whom said his commitment to the DARE program won him their votes.

"Hearing that it had a chance of coming back was wonderful," said Mia Zimmerman, the legislative director for the county PTA and the mother of three children in St. Mary's public schools. "I guess I assumed they had dropped it and forgotten about it."

But despite parents' enthusiasm for DARE -- which brings uniformed officers to fifth-grade classrooms to teach students about the negative effects of drugs -- scientific evidence indicates that the program is ineffective. Studies by the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Surgeon General's Office, and independent researchers over the past 20 years have repeatedly shown that young adults who went through DARE are just as likely to use drugs as those who did not.

"Evaluations suggested that DARE had no statistically significant long-term effect on preventing youth illicit drug use," the then-General Accounting Office, now the Government Accountability Office, wrote in 2003.

Nearly 80 percent of U.S. school systems use DARE, but an increasing number -- including those in Phoenix, Seattle and the District -- have cut the program in the past few years. When Zylak eliminated it from St. Mary's schools, the county became one of three in Maryland without the program. About 100 of Virginia's 134 jurisdictions use DARE.

"It was a manpower issue," Zylak said of his decision to cut the program. "But in determining which programs would be cut, first we thought about the effectiveness and cut DARE early on."

Cameron and other DARE advocates said scientific studies that question the effectiveness of the program do not take into account the individual lives that it has affected. Mickey M. Bailey, a former sheriff's deputy who taught DARE in county schools for 10 years and now teaches criminal justice classes at James A. Forest Technology and Career Center in Leonardtown, said many of his current students recognize him as their DARE teacher.

"It's the type of job where you make a difference as opposed to on patrol where you lock up the same people over and over again," Bailey said. "Students regularly tell me it did make a difference in their lives."

Cameron said the main benefit of the program is that it allows children to have contact with law enforcement officials in a positive, educational environment. DARE lessons taught by uniformed officers are a necessary supplement to parents' warnings about drugs, he said.

"It is clear to me that a significant proportion of the community wants their kids to have this education," Bailey said.

But David J. Hanson, a prominent critic of DARE and professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at Potsdam, said such enthusiasm for the DARE program ignores the facts.

"It may be that we want it to work so badly that we give it the benefit of the doubt," Hanson said. "But we should be using programs that have proven they're effective or that we have good reason to believe would be effective, which does not include DARE."

Cameron said he will stick by his promise to dedicate officers to a drug education program, but added that he would consider other programs.

"We want to use a program that works, and we don't necessarily have to go with the trademark," he said. "The name of the program matters less than how we can integrate it into our schools."