JIMERSONTOWN — Students and chaperones from nine Cattaraugus County school districts attended a Kids Escaping Drugs education summit Nov. 2 at the Allegany Community Center in Jimersontown.
Plans for the summit by Salamanca High School social workers Bri Postle, Ashleigh Bova and Amee Crowley were presented Oct. 24 at a school board meeting.
“It’s something they have pursued over the past couple of years,” said Christopher Siebert, high school principal, at the board meeting. “It’s an initiative in working with some other school districts and organizations to help provide support for our students and develop some leadership in that role.”
Bova said they sent out invites to the 13 school districts in Cattaraugus County for two students per grade for grades 8 to 11 and a couple chaperones to attend the summit.
The attendees arrived around 8:30 a.m. to register, Bova explained. At 9, the students would split into groups for youth presentations until noon. The adult chaperones will also be in groups for their own presentations.
“Our theme is ‘Drugs Mask Who You Are,’” she said. “The kids came up with that, because when someone is using drugs or alcohol, you don’t really get to know who that person is.”
Besides a Drugs Mask Who You Are presentation, other sessions included Sources of Strength, Stereotypes of Addicts, a basic drug information presentation and the Dangers of Social Media. The adult presentations included narcan training, what to look for when suspecting a child is using drugs, Substance Abuse 101, drug identification and a social media presentation.
The day concluded with everyone watching a PSA after lunch from 12:30 to 1 p.m.
“They will talk to everyone there about how the information the students and chaperones learned there can be taken back to their schools to help get something going there to assist with the issue,” she said.
After the event, Crowley said she thought it went well for a first year. Although she didn’t make it around to all the groups and presentations, she said everyone she talked to called it a success.
“I would say it’s just fantastic,” she said. “We’re looking forward to having this every year with the hopes that we can get 13 out of 13 schools.”
AT THE Oct. 24 Board of Education meeting, Postle said she and Crowley attended a face-to-face drug education summit in Hamburg last fall with six students. Postle said they quickly recognized a lot of the benefits to attending.
“While our students were broken into different break-out sessions throughout the morning, the chaperones that came attended different workshops as well,” she said.
Postle and Crowley attended presentations similar to what was planned for theirs at the Allegany Community Center.
When the students returned at lunch, they shared some things they took away from their breakout sessions. Postle said in one of their groups, the students were asked to describe what a drug user looks like, and they started to describe a disheveled or homeless person that you might see in the movies.
“It was at this time that a peer in their group revealed to the group that they were in recovery,” she said. “They were just a typical peer that looked like them, and this was really eye opening to some of our students.”
Crowley said the Salamanca school district has participated in Prevention Needs Assessment surveys since 2011 and have six school years worth of data on the drug and alcohol use habits of students in the high school. She said 13 other school districts in the county also participated in the survey.
In one question asking the student if they have consumed alcohol in the past 30 days — the definition of a regular user, according to the survey — Crowley said an average of 4.8 percent of Salamanca students said they did starting in seventh grade.
“Their number one choice is alcohol, second is marijuana, third is cigarettes and fourth is chewing tobacco,” she said. “Those statistics are slightly higher when compared to other schools within Cattaraugus County.”
In 2015, 18.2 percent of juniors said they had used marijuana in the past 30 days, the highest of any grade level surveyed, Crowley said. The average age of students first trying marijuana was 12 years, 10 months. For alcohol, the average age of students first drinking was 12 years, seven months old.
“We are slightly higher on some of these when you look at the Cattaraugus County levels, which is why there was such a need for us to say let’s bring something like this to our area,” she said.
After the summit last fall, Postle and Crowley began discussing the idea of having a similar summit in Cattaraugus County for neighboring school districts that couldn’t attend the one in Erie County. They began planning shortly thereafter, and, along with Bova, invited others in the community to participate in the youth summit.
“It is helpful to understand what our students are finding themselves engaged in,” said Salamanca Superintendent Robert Breidenstein, “but also knowing that we’re working on offering some additional support to those students who do find themselves in those circumstances.”
(Contact reporter Kellen Quigley at kquigleysp@gmail.com.)
