Blast from the past

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Bob Hurley always hated overhearing a parent in a restaurant tell their child, “If you don’t eat your food, he’ll come over here and arrest you.”

A 27-year veteran of the Iowa State Patrol, the Jefferson resident never did slap the cuffs on any picky eaters, but he would have happily arrested a few parents for depicting law enforcement as something to fear.

So when he had the opportunity to go into area schools with a little-known program called D.A.R.E., he jumped at the chance to show kids firsthand “we’re not the big bad guys.”

The year was 1990.

Trooper Hurley so endeared himself to local ’90s kids that he’ll always share a space in their memories with Air Jordan, Barney, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, “Super Mario Kart,” Bubble Tape, Ecto Cooler and the Backstreet Boys.

Not bad for a middle-aged, bald father of three wearing two shades of brown.

“Bob not only had three kids,” wife Kristie Hurley recently recalled, “he had thousands of kids.”

In resurrecting the police-led D.A.R.E. program in Greene County, the Jefferson Police Department hopes to make a lasting impression on a new generation of fifth graders.

When Officer Caleb Jans walks into a classroom at Greene County Middle School later this fall for the first of 10, 45-minute classes, it will mark the return of D.A.R.E. — the acronym for Drug Abuse Resistance Education — after an absence locally of more than 15 years.

“It’s important to build relationships with the youth,” Jans, 24, said.

The department’s newly minted D.A.R.E. officer, Jans completed his two-week D.A.R.E. training at Camp Dodge on Sept. 28, eager to step into a role that has gone unfilled anywhere in Greene County since Hurley’s retirement last decade.

Jans will work with fifth graders at Paton-Churdan as well.

The Greene County Community School District offers a free lunch any day of the week to officers who want to dine with students, but for some of them, it will be the first time seeing a cop on school grounds for reasons that aren’t disciplinary.

“Beyond the uniform,” Jans explained, “we’re people, too.”

Their desire to reboot D.A.R.E. may come from a similar place — who better to encourage kids to make sound life decisions than a uniformed officer of the law? — but it’s not like they’re just bringing back “Blue’s Clues” with a new host.

Society has undergone dramatic changes since the ’90s, and even since Hurley’s retirement from the state patrol in 2005.

For starters, in the time between the end of D.A.R.E. in Greene County and its return, the world quite literally went to pot.

Marijuana — the mother of all gateway drugs, as any old D.A.R.E. graduate worth their diploma will tell you — is now legal for recreational use by adults in nine states and counting.

“Our society is so receptive to drugs now,” Hurley, 70, said.

Between society’s relaxed attitude toward marijuana and a steady rise in the number of people abusing prescription drugs, it was a heck of a time for there to be a lapse in prevention education locally for fifth graders.

“And a lot of parents,” Hurley said, “aren’t telling them it’s wrong and dangerous either.”

There’s been no specific prevention curriculum for local fifth graders in recent years, said Shawn Zanders, principal at Greene County Middle School.

But, fond memories aside, did D.A.R.E. ever work in the first place?

The new D.A.R.E. isn’t your father’s D.A.R.E. — if for no other reason than your father was still likely to fool around with drugs and alcohol even after his D.A.R.E. graduation.

The story of D.A.R.E., which began in 1983 as a partnership between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District, is one of searching for a curriculum that actually works.

Even as far back as the ’90s, researchers independent of D.A.R.E. were concluding that the program had minimal long-term influence on drug use.

Jefferson-Scranton held its first D.A.R.E. graduation ceremony the evening of Jan. 7, 1991, at the school gym in Scranton, with Hurley, Principal Ken Morlan and guest speaker Lee Martin, co-host of Q-102’s “Q Morning Zoo,” conferring certificates on the grads.

By 1999, 32 percent of Greene County 11th graders admitted on the Iowa Youth Survey to using marijuana. The survey is administered biennially to students in grades 6, 8 and 11 by the Iowa Department of Public Health.

All were one-time D.A.R.E. graduates.

Two of those independent researchers critical of D.A.R.E. were later invited to join the organization’s scientific advisory board, resulting in a new curriculum in 2001 called “Take Charge of Your Life.”

That, too, was found to not have lasting behavioral outcomes, the D.A.R.E. organization admits.

When it came time to once again take the Iowa Youth Survey in 2002, 31 percent of local 11th graders said they’d tried marijuana.

Developed at Penn State and Arizona State universities with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an entirely new D.A.R.E. curriculum, “keepin’ it REAL,” has been in place at the middle school level since 2008 and in the nation’s elementary schools since 2013.

Whereas a D.A.R.E. officer may have once lectured about specific drugs and their negative effects — the prevailing prevention science at the time — the emphasis is now on facilitation and interaction.

“We want the kids to teach each other,” Jans said. “I’m going to lead them, but we want them to say, ‘We can do this together.’ ”

Resisting drugs is still at the core of D.A.R.E., but the program is designed to help students navigate any number of stressful situations, according to Jans.

For what it’s worth, only 16 percent of Greene County 11th graders in 2016 admitted to using marijuana on the Iowa Youth Survey — students are taking the survey again this month — but 30 percent said there was “no risk” of harm by smoking marijuana more than once a week.

By comparison, 63 percent said there was “great risk” of harm by smoking cigarettes daily.

While the effectiveness of D.A.R.E. has long been called into question, the program can still be found in more than 75 percent of the nation’s school districts, in part because one aspect has always been seen as worthwhile — the use of cops to teach it.

Studies have shown that students perceive law enforcement officers to be credible sources when it comes to lessons on substance abuse prevention.

“There’s value in them hearing it from someone credible. It carries a different weight to it,” said Libby Towers, guidance counselor at Paton-Churdan.

Zanders was more than happy to accept the police department’s offer to revive D.A.R.E. locally, calling it “really timely.”

“The curriculum is great,” he said, “but the time spent working with members of the police department is so beneficial for our kids at that age.”

Zanders said he’s grateful the program is returning to Greene County.

“In our society today, it’s something that should be taught to all students,” he said. “You know what they’re running into out there. There’s some really scary stuff out there.

“Kids who don’t know about it are at a disadvantage.”

Despite marijuana’s legalization in a growing number of states, D.A.R.E. America remains firm in its opposition, citing the fact that today’s marijuana is five to 10 times stronger than what it calls the “Woodstock weed” of yesteryear.

In becoming a D.A.R.E. officer, Jans is following in his father’s footsteps. His dad, Pat Jans, was the Perry Police Department’s D.A.R.E. officer until his retirement this past May.

A member of the Jefferson police force since 2017, Caleb Jans remembers the excitement in the room each week when his dad walked in to teach D.A.R.E.

“I saw the impact he made on the schools,” said Jans, a 2013 graduate of Perry High School and a 2017 graduate of Simpson College.

It became his goal to become a D.A.R.E. officer as well.

“You have to have an officer who wants to do it,” Hurley said.

Hurley would have taught D.A.R.E. right up until his own retirement if not for budget cuts several years prior that eliminated the Iowa State Patrol’s participation in the program.

In his day, Hurley taught D.A.R.E. full-time in 11 schools throughout a five-county area.

In Greene County, he jokes, “Half the county was happy I was off the road,” meaning he wasn’t around to write tickets.

Hurley believes a local police officer will be more effective than a trooper as a D.A.R.E. instructor.

“They see the kids on a daily basis,” he explained, “downtown, the rec center, the grocery store.”

By comparison, spread over five counties, he sometimes didn’t know much about the kids he was instructing — and admits he got burned a few times when bringing in high school “role models” who had, unbeknownst to him, been picked up for possession of alcohol.

But there’s no question Hurley helped turn D.A.R.E. into a household brand in west-central Iowa.

“Schools were completely unfamiliar with it,” he said, recalling his first year as a D.A.R.E. officer. “We had to go and sell it to them.”

Some teachers were resistant to give up classroom time.

Even some parents were skeptical, Hurley said, recalling one particular mother at Paton-Churdan.

“The mother would come to class and monitor everything I said,” he recalled. “She thought the colors, black and red, were witch colors.”

Eventually, he won over them all.

He now encounters former D.A.R.E. kids almost everywhere he goes, or doesn’t go. His next-door neighbor was a D.A.R.E. student when she was a girl.

His podiatrist in Carroll was a D.A.R.E. student, as was her nurse.

“It does make me feel old,” he said.

Annie Smith, K-12 principal at Paton-Churdan, will come full circle — from being one of Trooper Hurley’s D.A.R.E. kids as a sixth-grader at East Greene to overseeing the fifth graders at P-C who will benefit from the revived D.A.R.E. program.

And not a moment too soon.

Smith said it’s more important than ever for kids to have conversations about doing the right thing.

“You can’t ever educate too much,” she said. “Their access to information is so much greater than ours back in the day.”