There’s a lot more SACY in the Vancouver School District these days.
SACY, or the School-Age Children and Youth substance abuse prevention program, started off last year as a pilot program in two secondary schools, as described in a June 2007 Four Pillars News story.
Last fall, the program expanded to a further four schools so it’s now being offered in six secondary schools during the 2007/08 school year, including Tupper, Kitsilano, Britannia, Templeton, King George and Killarney. Coordinator Art Steinman said he’d like to see it expand to all Vancouver secondary schools by 2011. “Every year until then we’d like to add new schools.”
“We like to think we’re helping students and schools re-frame the whole issue.” Art Steinman, SACY Coordinator
The program offers substance abuse prevention by building relationships and delivering consistent messaging. It focuses on four inter-related streams: youth engagement, parents, school policy and teacher training in drug education. “We like to think we’re helping students and schools re-frame the whole issue.”
Steinman said he hopes that the element of the program dealing with student suspensions will be district-wide within one year. Right now, students who show up drunk at a dance or stoned at school are suspended for three days, time they either spend at home or sitting outside of the principal’s office.
SACY has developed a three-day program with a staff member working full time on it. The SACY suspension takes place Tuesday to Thursday at a central location. At the suspension, the student works with staff (along with the staff person, three team members who normally work with the kids in SACY schools take a day each to work with the suspended students), to administer a self-assessment to help them understand how substance use is affecting their life.
They work on identifying things in their life that interest and excite them, such as making music or drawing. Then, they create a plan to re-enter their school community without using substances and bring their passion into their life. They also identify an adult ally at the school, such as a teacher, administrator, coach or counsellor they can confide in and ask for support. They then share their plan with the administrator who suspended them and receive an invitation to join the SACY group at their school. “It’s building up kids, not tearing them down,” Steinman said.
“It’s building up kids, not tearing them down.”
Meanwhile, SACY staff contact the student’s parents or caregivers to inform them of the process, share parent resources with them and invite them to get involved with the SACY parent stream at the school.
The suspension program is new to Vancouver schools. “This is completely a pilot. This has never been done in Vancouver before,” Steinman said. He said it will be offered district-wide as soon as it’s feasible, possibly by September of 2008. Schools that want to be part of the suspension program but do not have SACY in the school yet must commit to working with SACY to offer the students follow-up activities.
Meanwhile, SACY has worked with the Centre for Addictions Research to create six lesson plans that will be tested in classrooms. Rather than offer simple answers to substance use questions, the lessons use an inquiry method that forces kids to seek out information and then apply the knowledge to their own lives. SACY will offer teacher training on the curriculum this spring.
The two core partners for SACY are the Vancouver School Board and Vancouver Coastal Health. The BC Ministry of Health offered $90,000 to the program for research and evaluation and the National Crime Prevention Centre funded staff through a $187,000 grant for this school year. Steinman said more money is needed to sustain the program so he continues to look for other funders.
The two-school pilot from last year has been evaluated by an external evaluator and the December 2007 report is posted on the Four Pillars website. Steinman said the reports back from parents, students and teachers were clear: “This was pretty life changing.”
