Welcome to our E-Bulletin!

Greetings from CSAP's Northeast CAPT. This month's stories include:

New Hampshire State Incentive Grant Yields Positive Outcomes
Maine's Media Campaign Sends Parents Strong Message about Underage Drinking
Cutting Edge: SAMHSA Releases New Report on the Dangers of Marijuana
Funding issues
New resources from the Northeast CAPT
Websites you should know
Conferences and Events

New Hampshire State Incentive Grant Yields Positive Outcomes

In 1999 the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention and Recovery begin to administer the State Incentive Grant (SIG) it had been awarded from CSAP. After several years of implementation and a rigorous local-level evaluation, the results of this statewide prevention initiative are coming in. The evaluation has shown that program implementation efforts in several communities have yielded positive outcomes with their target populations. Jonathan Stewart, the director of the Community Health Institute and the primary evaluator of the NH SIG says,

"Two programs that have shown particularly positive results in New Hampshire communities are Dare to Be You and Reconnecting Youth. Dare to Be You, a program that aims to strengthen protective factors in the family domain, appears to have been successful in decreasing parental stress and use of negative forms of discipline while increasing use of limit setting and effective parent-child communication.

Reconnecting Youth, which is being called Healthy Choices in New Hampshire, is a prevention program designed for teens who are at-risk for dropping out of high school. Significantly positive trends were observed for program participants with respect to school absences, suspensions, and grades. In contrast, negative trends were observed for a comparison group of youth on each of these three indicators. Program participants also reported significant reductions in 30-day use of tobacco, hard liquor, and marijuana."

The Coos County Coalition which serves a large, rural area in Northern New Hampshire implemented Dare to Be You in three economically disadvantaged communities beginning in 2000. Project Director for the coalition Valerie Herres said, "Our implementations of the program confirmed what the research had shown. It reduced the amount of harsh punishment on the part of parents and increased the amount of guidance and positive discipline provided to their children. This in turn accelerated the social development of those children." She added that the program, "helped build a sense of community" by bringing volunteers into the implementation process. The coalition began sustainability efforts before the culmination of the SIG grant and have been able to secure funding streams to sustain the implementation of Dare to be You in two of the communities.

The model program Reconnecting Youth was implemented under the name of Health Choices in Franklin High School, a school with about 500 students in Franklin, NH. The program was embedded in their student assistance program and the program implementers wrapped additional counseling services around the model program. The high school saw a drastic reduction in the number of kids leaving school. Program Director of Child and Family Services of New Hampshire Amy Pepin said, "We worked with 69 students and all of them successfully graduated or returned to school the following year." She added, "The dropout rate dropped by half school-wide. We graduated over 100 kids after not having a graduating class of over 70 in the past seven years." The program has been sustained by a federal Safe and Drug Free Schools grant from the U.S. Department of Education through the end of this year.

As a result of the hard work of these communities and the positive outcomes they produced, several additional New Hampshire communities are now implementing these two model programs throughout the state.

The main aim of the campaign was to narrow the gap between parents'
perception of underage drinking and the actual percent of high school
student who report consuming alcohol. The idea of transmitting this
message came out of a survey that was conducted with 500 parents of
adolescents and compared with a similar survey that was conducted with high
school students. The survey showed that while most parents believed that
their children had not had more than a few sips of alcohol in their
lifetime, in fact 65% of students reported having more than a few sips of
alcohol in their lifetime, 38% reported drinking alcoholic beverages in the
past 30 days, and 20% reported they had participated in at least one
episode of drinking to excess. "We found out that parents were concerned
about underage drinking, but didn't believe it was their child who was
drinking; the discrepancies between what they believed about their own kids
and the students responses was huge," said Linda Williams, Prevention Team
Manager at OSA.

OSA understood that in order to get parents to get involved in their teens'
lives and take steps to prevent underage drinking, a clear message had to
be sent to them. In collaboration with Ethos Marketing and Design and
PanAtlantic, the media campaign was designed and launched in the Portland
and Bangor TV markets. Three ads ran on and off for six months from
January until June 2003. The first ad had a pediatrician describing
parents' misperceptions about their children and alcohol, and how most
adolescents believed that they would not get caught drinking by their
parents. The other two ads had a mother and a father talking about their
experience finding out that their children drink. All three ads ended by
asking parents to order a free parents kit that included practical tips,
useful facts, and valuable statewide resources to help parents monitor and
prevent alcohol use by their teen.

"The response to the campaign was dramatic," says Williams, "In the first
week we could have given away all the kits." High schools and community
organizations began distributing the kits, asking for hundreds at a time,
to the point that OSA was quickly running out of them. Luckily several
corporate sponsors agreed to donate funds to reprint more. In addition, a
television station agreed to create a 30 minute video about the campaign
and the message it was transmitting. The video too was reproduced and
distributed to schools across Maine.

The high demand for the parent kit was not the only indicator of success.
Once the campaign ended, another survey was conducted with teenagers'
parents. The results indicated that 60% of parents remembered seeing the ad, 50% were able to remember the message of the campaign and among the respondents that reported ordering the kit, 93% said they read more than half of the kit. "[The campaign] exceeded our goals, we were thrilled to know that 60% of survey respondents remembered the ad and 50% remembered the message," explained Williams. "In addition, OSA was gratified by the change in parents' willingness to believe that their child could be at risk and to change some of their parenting techniques."

In spite of Williams satisfaction with the impact of the campaign, she admits worrying about how long the impact will last. Now that the ads are off the air there is concern that parents will soon forget the message they received from the ads. To avoid this, OSA is currently exploring options to continue the media campaign on a smaller scale.

To learn more about Maine's media campaign visit http://www.maineparents.net.