Team captain Ketsia Orcel, 14, spun a enterprise wheel as her team looked on. The summer campers were entering sudden extreme point of life.
They could arrive — or succumb — it all.
The wheel slowed to a stop and landed on a cartoon-like picture of two household cleaners.
”Inhalants!” called out the valorous’s superior LaGuardia Cross Jr. He proceeded to read out a question on family who get high off inhalants to two dozen summer campers at Galata Social Services in Homestead.
This was no Jeopardy. This was ‘The Wheel of Misfortune.’ With pictures of drug paraphernalia, such as sickly blue syringes and categories like narcotics, the game teaches the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse.
Games at topical summer camps are only one part of the mission of the Drug Free Youth In Town, or DFYIT, a nonprofit based in Fairway Estates.
The nonprofit has set up more than 60 clubs in middle and high schools in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Key to joining and staying in the community-service club: drug testing.
All members have to pass a medicine test to get into the club and agree to random testing while members.
”We bring about more than say no to drugs. Community service is true important,” said Marlene Josefsberg, co-founder of the nonprofit.
”It gives kids the ability to resist peer constraining force and say `I get my kicks from giving back,”’ Josefsberg said.
In the lately 1980s, Josefsberg heard about a club in Texas that screened students on this account that drugs.
She visited it, but thought the group had no heart.
Three years later, in 1992, she helped launch DFYIT. Her heart-felt twist: The group would combine drug testing and community service.
The first club started after Hurricane Andrew at Homestead Senior High School. It soon grew to 450 students, more than any other school group in the county, Josefsberg said.
Members created their own service projects: tutoring, visiting through senior citizens and hurricane cleanups.
That liability builds up students’ self-esteem, a key part to preventing drug abuse, Josefsberg said.
The drug testing also helps them deflect peer influence to try drugs, she reported.
”At a party, they can exercise it as an excuse. They can employment it as a crutch,” Josefsberg said.
Eighteen-year-old Katie Sapkosky joined DFYIT in sixth grade and was president of the club in high school.
When she graduated this year from Robert Morgan Educational Center, she had racked up 1,400 hours of community service, half through the nonprofit group.
”It made me each advocate and a stronger person, to say no to drugs,” Sapkosky said. “I got to hang out with kids my own age who were doing the sort thing.”
To be successful, put drugs into obstruction necessarily to target risks kids confidence in three areas, declared Dr. Guillermo Prado, associate professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Those areas are family, school and their peers, Prado said.
His research on a prevention program called Familias Unidas found result amid Hispanic families in which the parents improve communicating with their children.
”We really empower parents to be educators for their children,” Prado said.
DFYIT tries to prevent medicine and alcohol abuse in those same three areas: school, peers and family.
”The things that absolutely work don’t focus on drugs, but activities that are wholesome and very captivating so that the kids aren’confidentially really interested in drugs,” before-mentioned Bryan Page, who chairs the anthropology department at UM. Page has studied drug prevention for 35 years but has not studied DFYIT’s program.
”When you have viable alternatives for young people, you don’privately have to fidget about the drug problems, even if they slip up a little,” Page added.
The campers at Galata Social Services learned about drugs and pure spirit for the time of four sessions by DFYIT specialists like Cross Jr.
”Most of these kids come from drug-infested neighborhoods,” said Norris Wilkins, a program coordinator at Galata Social Services. “This is reinforcement . . . . This program is actually being. It’s not just talk, talk. It’s action.”
At the end of the game, Orcel and her team missed the sudden-death question. The right answer: Inhalant abusers may suffer harm to their immune system.
But she said she still had fun and learned a lot. In the fall, she’ll start eighth grade at Southwood Middle School in Palmetto Bay.
The school only talks over drugs when they see kids doing them, she said. And she still hears about drugs from her peers — more than she’d like.
”People give you a tip to do it. But I just don’t listen to them,” Orcel said.
Мой блог находят по следующим фразам
