Schools
What’s in it for school administrators and parents?

The promise of the Parent Corps is that all of our children, free of the influence of alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs, will grow up to fulfill the sweet promise of their futures.

After 20 years as a school administrator and 13 years as an educator, I see the Parent Corps as having a significant value for schools. Administrators are busy, and they’re constantly bombarded with ideas and potential programs. The Parent Corps uses parents to support teachers and administrators, not to make more work for them.

~Jack Pautz, Parent Leader and Principal (retired), Kaukauna High School, Kaukauna, Wisconsin

School Administrators

The Parent Corps is a unique drug-prevention effort that works with very little effort on the part of the school administration.

In school, the primary role of the teacher is to help students learn classroom material and experience the joy of gaining knowledge. Teachers and administrators are not trained to deal with drug and alcohol problems in school. However, schools have increasingly been burdened with the default position of substituting for some parents in the struggle to keep kids drug free. Members of the Parent Corps take the responsibility for adolescent drug prevention back into the arms of trained, responsible parents.

By helping keep students drug free, the Parent Corps allows teachers to teach and not become distracted by disciplinary and other behavior problems brought on by student drug use.

Insights gained from the pilot program thus far show that administrators are keenly interested in reconnecting parents to schools. Many of the schools in the Parent Corps pilot program have created in-school Parent Corps Resource Centers as places for parents to gather, obtain accurate, science-based information about drugs, and plan prevention activities. The Parent Corps finds ways to involve parents in their children’s schools, even though some 65 percent of today’s parents of school-age children work. The Parent Corps builds parent groups that support the school, rather than attack it as so often happens now. This has enormous value to school officials.

Parents

The impact of drug abuse and addiction on adolescents includes long-lasting and perhaps permanent changes in the brain and therefore in behavior, lost lives, long-term physical and mental illness, long-term addiction, criminal behavior, and a host of other problems that can be avoided if parents can prevent their children and adolescents from initiating use in the first place. The financial cost of not doing so is staggering.

Kids are networked with each other, and wired to receive powerful pro-drug messages through subtle marketing by the alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drug industries and a broad range of media. And kids know how to play the game, getting away with telling adults what they want to hear. Parents usually have no idea about what’s coming at their kids until it’s too late. The Parent Corps helps parents connect the dots and form enlightened, influential, and powerful parent peer groups to counter these forces. The result is no denial, no surprises, no excuses.

When parents know how to identify the signs of drug use, what to look for and what to do about it, early experimentation doesn’t grow to full-blown addiction. And when parents have group support from other parents, they can better stand up to the insistence, even the anger, of their kids.