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View Full Version : Risky behavior takes center stage


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04-04-2007, 03:00 PM
Groups of students and their parents gathered in the William Byrd High School auditorium last week for “Let’s Talk: Listen, Learn and Ask--A Dose of Prevention,” a town-meeting style presentation on prevention that covered such topics as Roanoke County’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, “cyber-bullying” and cough medicine abuse.

After a brief introduction by Joe Scott, a former social worker and current Student Assistance Program (SAP) Coordinator at Byrd, Nancy Hans explained why the federally funded Roanoke County Prevention Council, for whom she is coordinator, considers the Youth Risk Behavior Survey to be important.

She said that since the survey had been executed three times the findings were considered trend data and could be used to focus council programs on problem areas.

There will be a fourth survey taken in 2008.

Hans began by giving middle school statistics for risky behaviors such as drinking alcohol, smoking, marijuana use and bullying. She pointed out in particular that the number of sixth graders surveyed who reported smoking cigarettes had gone down sharply from previous years to 12 percent, possibly due to prevention programs enacted in SAP programs in elementary schools during the fourth and fifth grade.

The council gave the findings to academics at Virginia Tech and Bridgewater College, who took the survey answers and analyzed results in order formulate ratios on drinking and substance use. In this case they looked to see what the odds were for other risky behaviors if a student drank before age 13, such as marijuana or prescription drug abuse.

Hans discussed another part of the survey that focused on the relationship between student’s perception of parental disapproval and perceived risk. She noted in particular a disconnect in the problem area of alcohol.

“What we are seeing is that youth are getting a mixed message about alcohol because alcohol is socially accepted. That’s the piece where we are trying to ask adults to have some clear rules.”

Dr. Kerry Redican, one of the analysts at Virginia Tech, then spoke about the student survey. He noted that the high school version had more questions than the middle school survey, in order to get information on different concerns and he noted how wide-ranging the survey in total is, covering 7,000 sixth through 12th graders in the Roanoke County Public Schools. When discussing the results, Redican said it was “relatively disturbing” that 47 percent of the high schoolers polled knew where to get alcohol easily.

According to Redican, the analysis also determined that if a student drank or smoked marijuana, they were two to three times as likely to skip school and cheat on a test. Redican stated this relation emphatically: “When one participates in these kind of risk behaviors, there’s going to be some collateral damage.”

Hans finished out the survey portion of the evening’s presentation by urging parents to connect with their children, build parent networks and learn about the effects of substances on developing brains.

Roanoke County E-learning Coordinator Caroline Overfelt took the floor to talk about Internet safety and stressed to parents that the computer savvy of today’s youth does not necessarily mean wisdom when dealing the World Wide Web. Continuing on the theme of wisdom, she asked the parents to instill “Netiquette” values based on common-sense adages and to make sure they themselves followed them.

Said Overfelt, “this modeling of behavior starts with the parents.”

In particular she related the old saying of “don’t talk to strangers” to the issues of spamming, and trolling for personal information that students may encounter. Overfelt urged parents to set up rules in their home for Internet use and create an atmosphere of disclosure where they know what their children are putting on the Internet, saying that students don’t realize the consequences of their actions.

“A second on the Internet is forever,” she said.

Overfelt also touched on the hot topic of cyber-bullying, saying that if a child is harassed online by another student there are a number of steps that can be taken to stop it. Some of these include keeping printouts of all bullying pieces, trying to identify the culprit and contacting the parents of the cyber-bully.

Dina Hackley-Hunt of the Roanoke Area Youth Substance Abuse Coalition spoke on the issue of prescription drug abuse. Hackley-Hunt said, “Prescription drug abuse has kind of snuck up on us,” and warned that parents and school officials need to be aware that abuse of such legal drugs is second only to marijuana abuse. Possible ways that teens can find prescription drugs included getting them from their own house, their friends or via the Internet. She said that a study had shown that 30 percent of online pharmacies need no prescriptions.

Hackley-Hunt warned about the practice of “pharming” in which young people mix drugs and then share them with other teens without any idea of how the drugs may interact. She spoke on the particular problem of cough medicine abuse, saying there are over 100 cough and cold medicines that include an active ingredient called DXM that students abuse. She gave out slang terms such as “robo-tripping,” “triple Cs” and “sizzurp” so that parents in attendance may become more aware of the dangers of ingesting excess cough medicine.

Scott then introduced Kendra Bush, a William Byrd High School senior who is president of Youth of Virginia Speak Out (YOVASO) about Traffic Safety and Youth Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention Project (YADAPP) at William Byrd. Both programs, Bush said, were based on teenagers teaching teenagers and she listed some of the projects that YOVASO has undertaken over the past year, such as going to the Vinton Christmas and Dogwood Parades to educate people on risky behaviors, enacting seatbelt checks and holding retreats at the 4-H center at Smith Mountain Lake. She urged students to join both organizations.

Scott spoke of the East County Prevention Council, a group of concerned students, teachers and administrators that meet every first Friday of the month at Byrd to discuss risky behaviors and how to strengthen communities by providing information to fight abusive behaviors.

The council is a branch of the Roanoke County Prevention Council, which has similar groups set up across the valley. Scott said students and parents alike were also encouraged to join the East County Prevention Council.

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