Vision of Protective Schools:
Linking Drug Abuse Prevention with Student Success

This weighty question, on the mind of nearly every educator, is discussed practically and with hope in A Vision of Protective Schools: Linking Drug Abuse Prevention with Student Success. The new handbook, a publication of the College of Education's Smith Prevention Initiative, contains the ideas of 14 prevention experts, teachers and principals.

The report is the result of the Conference on the Future Directions for Drug Abuse Prevention, held in March 1998 at the University of Arizona, and represents the collective vision of the specialists in drug abuse prevention, violence prevention, school health, curriculum development, classroom practice and federal policy who took part.

Because the risk factors for substance abuse, violence, teen pregnancy, school failure and delinquency overlap, a strong prevention effort can minimize a host of student problems, the experts say. It is possible to protect young people from a range of negative life outcomes with a minimum of specialized interventions, they conclude.

The experts argue that rather than taking away from academics, effective prevention is highly compatible with good education and that prevention efforts should be structured to be a pervasive feature of a healthy school climate. The handbook identifies 10 characteristics of protective schools. In each section, the ideal representation for that characteristic is outlined and then several achievable suggestions for "How do we get there from here?" are listed.