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D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is a collaborative effort by D.A.R.E. certified law enforcement officers, educators, students, parents, and community to offer an educational program in the classroom to prevent or reduce drug abuse and violence among children and youth. The emphasis is to help students recognize and resist the many direct and subtle pressures that influence them to experiment with alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, inhalants, or other drugs or to engage in violence.
The D.A.R.E. program offers preventive strategies to enhance those protective factors – especially bonding to the family, school and community – which appear to foster the development of resiliency in young people who may be at risk for substance abuse or other problem behaviors. Researchers have identified certain protective and social bonding factors in the family, school and community which may foster resiliency in young people, in other words, the capacity of young people for healthy, independent growth in spite of adverse conditions. These strategies focus on the development of social competence, communication skills, self-esteem, empathy, decision-making, and conflict resolution, sense of purpose and independence, and positive alternative activities to drug abuse and other destructive behaviors.
The program content for D.A.R.E. is organized into seventeen 45 to 60 minute lessons to be taught by a law enforcement officer with suggested extended activities to be integrated into other instruction by the classroom teacher. A specially trained officer is assigned to the school one day a week for one semester to conduct weekly lessons in grades 5 or 6. D.A.R.E. offers a variety of interactive, group participation, cooperative-learning activities which are designed to encourage students to solve problems of major importance in their lives. An important element of D.A.R.E. is the use of student leaders who do not use drugs as positive role models in influencing younger students.
Officer Michael J. Kovach has been teaching D.A.R.E. since 1998 for Colonial Regional Police Department. Officer Kovach teaches children at Lower Nazareth Elementary School, George Wolf Elementary School, Lehigh Valley Charter School and Sacred Heart School. He teaches approx 300 children in the 5th grade or 6th grades of these schools each year.