By Kaitlin Candelaria
The Safe and Healthy Homewood Coalition recently received a grant for more than $600,000 to prevent youth substance abuse in the community.
The coalition was jump started by Homewood City Schools Superintendent Bill Cleveland and Leigh Cohen Long, the behavior and intervention specialist for Homewood High School, three years ago.
“This is (Cohen Long’s) passion,” said Carissa Anthony, staff partner and prevention/coalition coordinator. She said Cohen Long was able to see the need for such a program in her day-to-day work, and Cleveland, being passionate about the Homewood community, agreed.
“I got to enter the scene with this great group of volunteers assembled and we’ve done quite a bit over the past two and a half years, but we’ve had to do it without funding,” Anthony said. “Now, this grant gives us the ability to really take it to the next level and do prevention like we haven’t been able to do before.”
Now, the Homewood City School district takes the lead on the program along with about 50 volunteers representing all 12 sectors of Homewood.
The grant is one of almost 700 provided by the office of national drug control policy totaling more than $86 million. According to a press release, the grants “will provide local community coalitions funding to prevent youth substance use, including prescription drugs, marijuana, tobacco and alcohol.”
The Safe and Healthy Homewood Coalition will receive the money over the next five years. The group currently focuses on three media campaigns combating marijuana, alcohol and prescription drugs.
“Those are the areas where we see the most concerning data,” Anthony said. “We also focus on tobacco as well. We don’t have any local assessment data on e-cigarette usage for our community, but certainly nationwide, that’s also becoming a huge problem.”
The new funding will be used to support current programs, such as peer helpers, in the middle school and high school while also filling in the gaps in the prevention curriculum.
“The Homewood City Schools’ plan has a prevention curriculum for grades K-12 and we’ve been about to make a lot of that happen without funding, so now we’re going to focus on filling in the gaps,” Anthony said. “We can now purchase a curriculum that’s evidence-based and also provide training on that curriculum.”
She said the coalition also still will host safe and positive events for teens while continuing to do more community outreach and more parent education activities.
One such event will be the upcoming Pills to Needles: A Pathway to Addiction program at the Homewood Board of Education building Oct. 29.
The event, which starts at 8 a.m., focuses on the link between teen abuse of pain pills and abuse of heroin down the line. The program will be moderated by Paul DeMarco and will include a panel featuring Brandon Falls, district attorney, Susan Brawley, a local mother who lost a son to a heroin overdose, and Angela Camp from Bradford Health Services.
“This is actually a repeat of a program we did two years ago and we want to continue to bring awareness to the issue of prescription drug abuse and how that can in some cases lead to heroin abuse,” Anthony said. “Oftentimes, when we see someone’s addiction go down the path of heroin use, there’s a high overdose and death rate. However, for the youth, the issue remains prescription drugs.”
Anthony said parents frequently ask her if community kids are abusing heroin.
“Our data doesn’t indicate that, but nationwide there is a problem with kids abusing prescription drugs, and that can be deadly, too,” she said. “There’s this misnomer that heroin is so deadly and if you take that step you could die, but the truth is we have adults and children who overdose on prescriptions and that is the number one killer. Taking a medicine that isn’t prescribed to you is a serious risk and that’s what led us to host this program. Obviously we need kids to know the risks, but we also have to make parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and anyone who might have prescription drugs in their home aware.”
Anthony said that if you have prescription drugs in your home, it’s always important to make sure you keep them in a secure location, monitor their levels and discard them when you’re done with them.
Since its inception, the coalition has been tracking data across the community on drug, alcohol and tobacco use among teens.
“We focus a lot on parents and parenting awareness because parents still to this day have more influence than any other person,” Anthony said. “Kids might act like they don’t want to talk about it and they don’t want rules and boundaries, but they really do. It makes them feel safer and creates a sense of security when you communicate clear expectations to them. Parents don’t need to forget how important they are.”
The Safe and Healthy Homewood Coalition meets each month at the Board of Education building and is open to anyone who’s interested in volunteering. For more information, visit www.homewood.k12.al.us. or email [email protected].
