Fourteen Iowa school districts will benefit from a grant received by ISU’s Institute for Social and Behavioral Research.

The $21 million grant, from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, will be used to develop a program to help Iowa’s youth in Clay, Emmet, Montgomery, Madison, Howard, Franklin, Henry, Cedar, Des Moines, Wapello, Webster, Marshall, Dubuque and Cerro Gordo counties resist drug abuse.

The program, PROSPER, stands for Promoting School-Community-University Partnerships to Enhance Resilience.

Stanley Johnson, ISU Extension Service vice provost, said the PROSPER program will address drug abuse using a community-based approach.

“The prevalence of substance [abuse] in the United States is real,” Johnson said. “There have been many approaches to dealing with this issue, but none that focus on community involvement.”

In several Iowa school districts, community task forces will be created to teach young people the skills they need to resist drug abuse. ISU extension, school staff members, community leaders, health care officials and social service providers will work together to recruit parents to fight the drug problem in Iowa.

The program will last five years and will include two groups of sixth graders and their families. Each community will put together a team of seven, the outreach team, to work with students and evaluate the outreach programs.

Marilyn Bode, family specialist for ISU’s Family and Consumer Science Extension said the outreach team chooses the curriculum appropriate for each district.

Iowa State will collaborate with Pennsylvania State University, where a similar program will be implemented. Project leaders are hopeful that these programs will prove to be successful in both states and that PROSPER can be used as a model for future programs throughout the nation, Johnson said.

In the past, drug intervention programs such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), have been targets of harsh criticism for not having a significant impact. However, Johnson remains optimistic that a well-designed program can be productive.

“Often times programs such as DARE don’t proceed from a strong research base,” Johnson said.

“The Institute and ISU have been cooperating to create programs that are comprehensive and increasingly involved with the schools, family and community. We have seen positive results from all those programs,” he said.

Bode said the programs and curriculum have proven to be effective.

If the five-year project is successful, researchers will begin a second phase and hopefully expand the program to other Iowa communities and other states.

For the past 12 years, ISU scientists have been conducting research on drug intervention programs and have developed several research-based curriculums, Johnson said. Each community task force will choose from a variety of curriculums that have been proven to be effective.

Community task forces began meeting last March, and the PROSPER program will begin immediately.

Johnson said he is hopeful that after the five-year project is completed, the community will see a significant decrease of drug abuse among Iowa’s youth and funding for programs such as PROSPER will continue.

“We’re very excited to begin this program because we want to make Iowa the best place for youth in this country,” Johnson said. “We know that in order to do that we have to deal with these issues.”

– Additional reporting by Jessica Anderson and Megan Hinds